Clinical studies show REMICADE reduces incidence of bowel surgeries in ulcerative coliti...(orted other notable serious adverse even...)

About the PharMetrics Analysis

This retrospective analysis examined medical and pharmacy claims from the PharMetrics Patient Centric database to determine healthcare resource utilization among patients with UC before and after a colectomy. The PharMetrics database contains enrollment data, pharmacy and medial claims from approximately 82 different managed care organizations, consisting of more than 46 million patients in the United States. It is considered representative of the insured population of the United States. Patient data was collected from January 1, 2000 through June 30, 2005, for any patient with a previous diagnosis of UC who had two distinct claims for treatment of UC and had a Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) code indicating colectomy.

A total of 411 patients were included in the analysis, and researchers collected data for each patient both 12 months prior to the colectomy and 12 months following colectomy. The researchers focused on the levels of inpatient, outpatient, emergency room, physician, laboratory and drug costs of care and found that healthcare utilization increased during the 12 months following colectomy. The increases were primarily driven by inpatient and outpatient visits.

The data showed that inpatient encounters increased during the 12 months after colectomy, compared with the number of encounters during the 12 months before colectomy (1.8 vs. 0.9). There were also increases in outpatient visits (19.4 vs. 8.7), emergency room visits (0.9 vs. 0.8), physician visits (14.9 vs. 13.9) and laboratory visits (2.2 vs. 2.1) during the post-colectomy period, compared with the pre-colectomy period.

About Ulcerative Colitis

UC is a chronic inflammatory bowel disease a
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