prescribeR is an R package developed as part of my PhD work, the main aim of which was to create a set of flexible, reusable functions for generating common drug exposure variables based on routinely collected prescribing data for use in pharmacoepidemiological and pharmacovigilance research, with a view to providing structured and standardised methods for quantifying drug exposure and reporting on how data were prepared to aid in the reproducibility and transparency of research.

The package was developed primarily for use on Scottish prescribing data, but is largely content neutral, and uses functions from the tidyverse family of packages to manipulate the data. At present, the package contains functions for deriving variables describing ever use vs. never use, use at specified time points or within time periods, prescription durations based on dosage instructions or assumptions and persistence calculated using the refill gap method.

At present, the main form of documentation for this package can be found within the R manual files, which provide descriptions of the individual functions, their arguments and their outputs. A wiki is currently under construction to provide more detail and examples for each function.