Sentinel Summary Tables

Sentinel summary tables were designed to facilitate distributed querying within the Sentinel network by summarizing utilization information using pre-defined concepts (disease, age groups, exposure). They contain aggregate patient counts of prevalent and incident occurrences of diagnoses and medical procedures and exposures to medical products, stratified by age group, sex, and year. 

PopMedNet supports three broad summary table query types: prevalent queries, incident queries, and most frequent utilization queries. The nine prevalence summary tables represent prevalence counts of diagnoses (3, 4, and 5 digit ICD9-CM), procedures (3 and 4 digit ICD9-CM and HCPCS), drug exposures (ingredient name and drug category), and enrollment. The three incidence summary tables represent diagnoses (3-digit ICD9-CM) and drug exposures (ingredient name and drug category). The most frequent utilization queries return the most frequently observed utilization (drug exposures, diagnoses, or procedures) defined by events or number of users by age group, sex, and year within the prevalence tables. 

The code set used for the specifications for HCPCS, ICD9-CM Diagnosis (3, 4 and 5 digit) and ICD9-CM Procedure (3 and 4 digit) query types are provided by OptumInsight (previously Ingenix). The query tool software uses the short name description, as opposed to the long name description, to match code names.  The Sentinel Operations Center compiles a list of diagnosis and procedure codes unique to each Data Partner’s code availability. The NDC set used for the specifications for the drug exposure (ingredient name and drug category) query types are provided by First Data Bank. 

Summary tables are created via distributed SAS programs developed by the Sentinel Operations Center and executed against the Sentinel Distributed Database held by each data partner. Each data partner is responsible for maintaining the summary tables behind their firewalls.