TreatmentPatterns: An R package to analyze treatment patterns of a study population of interest

Background and objectivesThere is an increasing interest to use real-world data to illustrate how patients with specific medical conditions are treated in real life. Insight in the current treatment practices helps to improve and tailor patient care. We aim to provide an easy tool to support the development and analysis of treatment pathways for a wide variety of medical conditions. MethodsWe formally defined the process of constructing treatment pathways and developed an open-source R package TreatmentPatterns (https://github.com/mi-erasmusmc/TreatmentPatterns) to enable a reproducible and timely analysis of treatment patterns. ResultsThe developed package supports the analysis of treatment patterns of specific populations of interest. We demonstrate the functionality of the package by analyzing the treatment patterns of three common chronic diseases (type II diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and depression) in the Dutch Integrated Primary Care Information (IPCI) database. ConclusionTreatmentPatterns is a tool to make the analysis of treatment patterns more accessible, more standardized, and more interpretation friendly. This tool can facilitate and contribute to the accumulation of knowledge on real-world treatment patterns across disease domains. We encourage researchers to further adjust and add custom analysis to the package based on their research needs.