Newness of drugs and use of HMO services by asthma patients

OBJECTIVE: To define newness of drug technology and show associations betwe en two measures of newness and health service utilization. METHODS: Healthcare use and changes in severity at each office visit were a ssessed for 1309 asthma patients from six health maintenance organizations (HMOs) during 1992. The age of each drug product, derived by subtracting it s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval date from January 1, 1992, wa s used to construct two newness measures: the average age of all asthma dru gs and, separately, all non-asthma drugs a patient used during the year and the percentages of a patients asthma drugs from each of four time interval s of asthma drug breakthroughs. Service utilization variables included all primary care provider (PCP) visits, total prescription costs, emergency dep artment (ED) visits, and hospitalizations. RESULTS: Using either measure of drug newness, multivariate analyses showed an association between greater use of newer asthma drugs and lower overall drug costs and fewer PCP visits. A trend was found between greater use of newer asthma drugs and fewer hospitalizations and ED visits. Newer non-asth ma medications were associated with fewer ED visits. CONCLUSIONS: After controlling for patient and site variables, greater use of newer asthma drugs was associated with significantly lower drug costs an d fewer PCP visits; associations with hospitalization rates and ED visits, although lower, were not significant.