Validity of Italian administrative healthcare data in describing the real-world utilization of infusive antineoplastic drugs: the study case of rituximab use in patients treated at the University Hospital of Siena for onco-haematological indications

INTRODUCTION: Italian administrative healthcare databases are frequently used for studies on real-world drug utilization. However, there is currently a lack of evidence on the accuracy of administrative data in describing the use of infusive antineoplastics. In this study, we used rituximab as a case study to investigate the validity of the regional administrative healthcare database of Tuscany (RAD) in describing the utilization of infusive antineoplastics. METHODS: We identified patients aged 18 years or older who had received ≥1 rituximab administration between 2011 and 2014 in the onco-haematology ward of the University Hospital of Siena. We retrieved this information from the Hospital Pharmacy Database (HPD-UHS) and linked the person-level information to RAD. Patients who had received ≥1dispensing of rituximab, single administration episodes, and patients treated for non-Hodgkin Lymphoma (nHL) or Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL) were identified in RAD and validated using HPD-UHS as the reference standard. We identified the indications of use using algorithms based on diagnostic codes (ICD9CM codes, nHL=200*, 202*; CLL=204.1). We tested 22 algorithms of different complexity for each indication of use and calculated sensitivity and positive predictive value (PPV), with 95% confidence intervals (95%CI), as measures of validity. RESULTS: According to HPD-UHS, 307 patients received rituximab for nHL (N=174), CLL (N=21), or other unspecified indications (N=112) in the onco-haematology ward of the University Hospital of Siena. We identified 295 rituximab users in RAD (sensitivity=96.1%), but PPV could not be assessed due to missing information in RAD on dispensing hospital wards. We identified individual rituximab administration episodes with sensitivity=78.6% [95%CI: 76.4-80.6] and PPV=87.6% [95%CI: 86.1-89.2]. Sensitivity of algorithms tested for identifying nHL and CLL ranged from 87.7% to 91.9% for nHL and from 52.4% to 82.7% for CLL. PPV ranged from 64.7% to 66.1% for nHL and from 32.4% to 37.5% for CLL. DISCUSSION: Our findings suggest that RAD is a very sensitive source of information for identifying patients who received rituximab for onco-haematological indications. Single administration episodes were identified with good-to-high accuracy. Patients receiving rituximab for nHL were identified with high sensitivity and acceptable PPV, while the validity for CLL was suboptimal.