gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Multimorbidity and polypharmacy are challenges for medical treatment concepts, individual decisions taken by physicians and decision makers in health policy and show age and gender dependent behavior. For modeling purposes a sufficiently huge data repository is needed.

Methods: Therefore the present study analyses all outpatient treatments and drug prescriptions in the North German State of Schleswig-Holstein in the first quarter of 2017. The first goal was to determine well adopted probability distributions for the occurrence of diseases and drug groups decreasingly ordered within the classification system in general as well as in detail for age and gender subgroups. As a second goal we will do the same for the distributions of multimorbidity and polypharmacy level determined by the number of codes for a patient in the considered quarter. For both tasks, a gamma distribution is used.

Results: As a main result gamma distributions provide a well-adjusted model class for ICD and ATC code frequencies in large routine datasets.

Discussion: With respect to small and large magnitudes the curve fitting with respect to measurements provides more adequate results than just using mean values and variances.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

The authors declare that an ethics committee vote is not required.