Improve handling of stale medication codelists in cohort-extractor
06 January 2023
dm+d codes for Virtual Medicinal Products (VMPs) can change over time, with the result that codelists that contain VMP codes can become stale.
As a consequence, studies that use patients.with_these_medications()
with an old codelist may not have captured all the medication events that the author intended.
Until now, the mitigation has been to review and update codelists manually. With this update, cohort-extractor keeps stale medication codelists up-to-date by expanding the original codelist, so that it includes all current and previous codes of any VMPs in the codelist. This happens automatically.
Note that a codelist containing a VMP and all associated AMPs will still become stale with respect to new AMPs for that VMP are added to dm+d; this case is not currently handled automatically.
We will be contacting all study authors to explain the potential impact of using stale codelists more widely.