PHAR, in collaboration with Genentech, presented findings from further validation of their claims-based algorithm used to identify patients with neuromyelitis optica spectrum disorder (NMOSD), a disorder that can be difficult to distinguish from other demyelinating central nervous system (CNS) disorders in clinical practice.
Earlier this year, PHAR developed an algorithm to distinguish patients with NMOSD from patients with multiple sclerosis and other CNS inflammatory disorders, validating it in a proxy insurance claims database derived from billing and medication records from three neurology care centers. Interim results were presented at ACTRIMS Forum 2022. Since then, PHAR has further demonstrated the performance of the algorithm in a dataset of 101 patients from five neurology care clinics and has tested its face validity using 2016–2019 data from IBM® MarketScan® Commercial and Medicare Supplemental databases. Their poster was presented at the 38th Congress of the European Committee for Treatment and Research in Multiple Sclerosis (ECTRIMS), and the abstract was published in the October supplement issue of Multiple Sclerosis Journal.