Authors
Benjamin Michaels, Jessica Pourian
Published in
Journal of medical Internet research. Volume 28. Pages e90954. Oct 06, 2026. Epub Oct 06, 2026.
Abstract
Assessing medication adherence is central to quality care, yet linking electronic health record (EHR) medication orders to outpatient pharmacy dispense data remains technically complex.
This study aimed to present a generalized, reproducible tutorial for linking EHR medication orders to pharmacy dispense data that can be used to assess medication dispense proportions.
We developed and validated a structured query approach to link EHR medication orders to external pharmacy dispense data using patient identifiers, medication-level identifiers, pharmacy identifiers, and temporal constraints. The tutorial emphasizes key design decisions, including handling multiple triggering events, deduplication across vendors, and managing formulation changes. A retrospective cohort of pediatric acute otitis media encounters (January 1, 2021, to January 1, 2024) was used as an illustrative example.
Overall, 98.3% (302/307) of pharmacies in the cohort returned at least 1 dispense record during the study period and were therefore classified as reporting pharmacies. Among 3404 orders, 2616 (76.9%) had a recorded dispense.
EHR-integrated pharmacy data provide a feasible, timely proxy for assessing medication adherence. This tutorial provides a scalable framework for linking EHR and pharmacy data for medication adherence studies, while highlighting key methodological considerations for SQL coding.
PMID:
42837533
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 07 Oct 2026.
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