AdhereR

AdhereR is a comprehensive and flexible open-source package designed to support researchers in electronic healthcare data (EHD)-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS). The package facilitates the development of high-quality, consistent, and reproducible evidence in medication management. Adherence to medications is an essential indicator of the quality of medication management and impacts health outcomes and the cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. Therefore, the use of EHD data to estimate adherence in research and clinical practice is increasingly common, and a critical concern is the standardization and transparency of data processing.

AdhereR is a package for the widely used open-source statistical environment R, designed to support researchers in computing EHD-based adherence estimates and visualizing individual medication histories and adherence patterns. The software package implements functions consistent with current adherence guidelines, definitions, and operations. These functions allow researchers to explore various analysis choices and adapt them to different health conditions and types of medications.

AdhereR also facilitates the integration of medication history visualizations in open-source CDSS platforms. While some EHD-based clinical decision support systems (CDSS) include visualization of medication histories, these are rarely integrated into adherence analyses and are not easily accessible for data exploration or implementation in new clinical settings. However, the implementation of AdhereR has made it possible to integrate medication history visualizations in open-source CDSS platforms.

The AdhereR package is freely available for use, and it has been illustrated with an example dataset of 2-year records of 100 patients. The example dataset demonstrates the possible analysis choices and how they can be adapted to different health conditions and types of medications.