Health Outcomes & Pharmacoeconomics [HOPE]

The Health Outcomes & Pharmacoeconomics (HOPE) data repository allows immediate access to nearly a hundred clinicians and tens of thousands of oncology patients through relationships with our core practices, proprietary information technology, and integration of multiple databases.

The HOPE initiative has 3 aims:

Evaluating practice patterns. This includes identification of the regimens employed in the treatment of patients with specific disease characteristics, and duration of treatment. It also includes examining variation in treatment based on patient characteristics such as age and stage of disease.

Health resource utilization. This includes assessment of the number of medical visits, number or type of concomitant medications used, incidence of hospitalization, and total claims across treatment groups. Analyses may also employ more sophisticated methods that estimate actual cost to the practice of treatment delivered to patients.

Patient reported outcomes. Using Patient Care Monitor data, patient reported outcomes reflecting symptom burden can be linked with other data to evaluate the impact of competing regimens or other treatment characteristics on symptoms and quality of life. The impact of patient or treatment characteristics can be examined at fixed points in time (e.g., end of chemotherapy), or they can be modeled longitudinally. The latter approach is particular effective in characterizing the impact of cancer and cancer treatment over time from the patient's perspective.

When augmented with medical record review, these data can also be used to retrospectively assess the relationship of practice patterns, resource utilization, and patient reported outcomes with treatment response outcomes.