A 2024 awarded grant under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Health Data for Action program, managed by AcademyHealth.
This project is funded under the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s research program, “Health Data for Action (HD4A),” which makes valuable data from unique data owners available to researchers to answer important research questions. The team at Tufts will perform a novel data linkage of the Specialty Drug Evidence and Coverage (SPEC) database, a dataset of 18 US commercial health plans' coverage policies for 290+ specialty drugs, and the Virginia All-Payer Claims Data. With these data, they will examine the association between step therapy requirements and time to biologic treatment initiation for inflammatory bowel disease, a common and costly chronic condition affecting over 1.3 million Americans. As secondary analyses, they will determine whether patient, provider, and health plan characteristics modify time to treatment initiation and whether step therapy requirements are associated with claim denials. Deliverables will include a project work plan and final narrative. The researchers will also produce papers suitable for publication and present findings at national research meetings and to other stakeholder audiences as appropriate, including policymakers at the federal, state, and local levels and other key stakeholders, as part of the deliverables for this grant.
Grant #81878
Grantee Organization: Tufts University Medical Center
Grantee period: 06/15/24 – 6/14/25
A. Alex Levine, MPH is a Senior Research Associate at Tufts Medical Center and a PhD candidate in Health Servi... Read Bio