Medication Searching

In this Prescribing in Taiwan webpage you can search for the prescribing rates of each drug (or drug group) by sex and age, recorded in 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2020. This is derived from the National Taiwan Health Insurance Databases, which included >99% of the Taiwanese population.

This database is free to use and free to share. Please refer to or cite this website so that we can prove there is benefit to invest into this type of work with descriptive nature. Users need to be aware that these are descriptive, with no intention to bear causal implications.

A document is written up to provide some background and methods. Below is a little Q&A section, but please contact us for any comments or queries.

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Prescribing in Taiwan

Q & A

What are prescribing rates?

Prescribing rates in this database is the proportion of individuals prescribed with a given medication, regardless of its dose, duration, or amount.

If there were 500,000 male in the age 30-39 registered (alive) in 2020, and 1,000 of them were prescribed with a drug in that year. The prescribing rate of male 30-39 would be 1,000 / 500,000 = 2%.

I cannot find the information of the drug I am interested.

Please refer to the ATC website to search for the ATC code of the drug you are interested. The drug are not included if there are not ATC-codable, or if they are rarely prescribed or rarely payable through the Taiwan National Health Insurance system (<1000 in each sex- and age-specific group).

Can I have the individual-level raw data?

We do not hold the raw data.

These numbers were derived from individual level data hosted by the Taiwan Ministry of Health and Welfare and are open for regulated research use.

How are the drugs grouped?

Drugs were re-coded according to the ATC (Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical) code. Some of them were grouped for pragmatic reasons. One main reason is to allow a larger total number of cases so that the chance of revealing individual identity is minimised.

Why are some drugs prescribed more than others?

We do not know or infer why some drugs were prescribed more than others. We encourage researchers or medical professionals to use this database to discover these questions.

Who are behind this project?

It appears quite difficult to publish this type of work academically, and therefore difficult to attract funding. Please spread the word if you find this is useful.

This project is currently led by TienYu Owen Yang and Yi-Fang Chuang.

This work has been partially funded by Taiwan National Science and Technology Council.

The analysis and the website has been supported by Pleiotropy.co.uk (this website)