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Owner: vitorit1
Created: Mar 23, 2012
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Using Canadian Pharmacies
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Introduction:  Health care costs in the Unites States, (US) continues to explode.  With our current rate of coronary artery disease, diabetes and other inflammatory disease, many Americans are looking for ways to contain out of pocket expenditures.  One way US citizens have began cutting costs is using online pharmacies from Canada to save thousands of dollars annually. 

 Methods:  A random sample of 10 commonly purchased prescription medications and their prices were recorded from two online pharmacies in the United States and at Aptecha, the largest Canadian online pharmacy.  A Repeated Measure ANOVA was performed to determine the difference in mean costs among the three pharmacies.  An assessment of findings is below.

Results/Analysis

Result 1: Pharmacy QQ Plot   [Info]
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Result 2: Pharmacy Boxplot   [Info]
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Result 3: Pharmacy assumptionTwo Way ANOVA   [Info]
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Result 4: Pharmacy Two Way ANOVA   [Info]
Analysis of Variance results:
Responses stored in: Cost
Row factor: Pharmacy
Column factor: Drug

ANOVA table
Source df SS MS F-Stat P-value
Pharmacy 2 47117.215 23558.607 49.648094 <0.0001
Drug 9 47042.992 5226.999 11.01553 <0.0001
Error 18 8541.213 474.5118
Total 29 102701.42


 

Conclusions: In terms of following the assumptions, it is noted there appears to be some variability in both the QQ plot and interaction plot in terms of Aptecha and the US pharmacies with pricing.  One medication (Celebrex) in particular.  There appears to be more similarity between the two US pharmacies.   

Using the information from the Analysis of variance testing, we can conclude that with 95% confidence, there is a significant difference between cost of medications between the Canadian and US pharmacies given the p value of <.0001 and Fstat of 49.  

Using the Tukey confidence intervals it is also clear that there is a significant difference between costs between Aptecha and US pharmacy 1 with the lower costs in the interval between 47.08 and 96.81.  US pharmacy 2 had an interval between 67.54 to 117.28.  Looking just between the two US pharmacies in terms of cost, there does not appear to be a significant difference in costs as noted by the intervals of -4.40 to 45.33.    

In conclusion, with 95% confidence it appears that going to Canada in order to obtain medication for typical health related management seems to be a cost effective method. 

  

 

HTML link:
<A href="http://www.statcrunch.com/5.0/viewreport.php?reportid=24495">Using Canadian Pharmacies</A>

Comments
Comment by fosteree2 on Mar 23, 2012
Good introduction! A few suggestions, it looks like a lot of what you included in your conclusion could be moved to the methods section (ie-QQplot and boxplot analysis) and Analysis section (ie-the Tukey CIs).
Comment by gibbss1 on Mar 23, 2012
Nice report. It would be nice to know what the cost differences were in terms of American dollars. Either way the information does a good job of showing the significance in price differences between the 2 countries.
Comment by clevingern1 on Mar 23, 2012
Sorry for the repetition, couldn't get it to go through haha.
Comment by clevingern1 on Mar 23, 2012
Overall nice job, I would keep your interpretations of the plots and ANOVA tests in the analysis/results section then put your final conclusion under conclusion. But I think you did a good job, and I did an initial graph like yours but then changed my mind. Not sure which one is correct.
Comment by clevingern1 on Mar 23, 2012
Overall nice job, I would keep your interpretations of the plots and ANOVA tests in the analysis/results section then put your final conclusion under conclusion. But I think you did a good job, and I did an initial graph like yours but then changed my mind. Not sure which one is correct.
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