Correlation of HEDIS diabetes health plan score with utilization of diabetes medications

This study sought to determine the correlation between a health plan's Health Plan Employer Data and Information Set (HEDIS) score for glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) control in patients with diabetes and its utilization of analog insulin, human insulin, and oral drug therapy as determined by the share of prescriptions of each therapy. Prescription volumes were tracked for four categories of diabetes drug therapy: (1) analog insulin, (2) human insulin, (3) single-source brand oral products, and (4) multisource generic oral products, for the three months ending January 2005 and January 2006 and matched to the 2004 and 2005 HEDIS scores. A correlation analysis conducted between the HbA1c-based HEDIS score and the prescription share of each drug category found a favorable and statistically significant (P < .0001) correlation between plan HbA1c HEDIS score and plan prescription share of analog insulin in both 2004 and 2005. The correlation between HEDIS scores and human insulin was not statistically significant. Unfavorable correlations were found between HEDIS scores and both the single-source brand and the multisource generic oral category prescription shares, although these correlations were found to be significant only for the single-source products in 2005.