Claims story: How to calculate age of a patient?

Claims story: How to calculate age of a patient?

Patient-level claims data from IQVIA or Symphony Health or Truven or Komodo Health includes claims for specific drugs along with the dates and the patient's birth year. From a commercial analytics perspective, patient age is a useful metric for classifying patients into categories: below 18 years, 18-65 years, and above 65 years.

There are two methods (I know of 😊) to calculate a patient's age:

>Simple and Commonly Used: Subtract the patient's birth year from the data pull year. For example, if the data was pulled in 2024 and the patient's birth year is 2012, the patient's age would be 2024 - 2012 = 12 years. This method works well for claims data from the recent 12 or 24 months of data pull, as the error in age calculation is typically only about a year.

>Complex and Used in Specific Scenarios: Index the patient's age based on the date of the last claim. For example, if the last claim was in 2022 (independent of the data pull year of 2024) and the patient's birth year is 2012, the patient's age would be 2022 - 2012 = 10 years. This method is useful when the data pull spans more than two years (e.g., 5 or 10 years) and provides more accurate age categorization.

Whichever method you use, it's important to call out the age calculation logic in your deliverable. It only takes a minute to describe the method in one or two sentences.. 

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