Research Activities, August 2012: Announcements: Symposium on new and emerging data methods published as a supplement to Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

Research Activities, August 2012: Announcements: Symposium on new and emerging data methods published as a supplement to Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

Symposium on new and emerging data methods published as a supplement to Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety

A June supplement to the journal Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety focuses on methods for developing and analyzing clinically rich data for patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR). The supplement papers comprise the proceedings of the 3rd invitational symposium on new and emerging methods for comparative effectiveness research and PCOR, which was sponsored by the DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions about Effectiveness) program of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) and held at AHRQ in June 2011. In an introductory overview, the editors note that the symposium's focus was on techniques that use clinically rich data sources or enrich existing data sources to bridge the gap between available data (often administrative) and data needed to study a question (incorporating necessary clinical detail).
The supplement also includes a commentary on the proper use and limitations of randomized clinical trials, and 16 original reports. The topics range from dealing with or adjusting for partially missing data, improving confounder adjustment, addressing heterogeneity of treatment, and methods for emerging therapies. Most of the reports in this supplement aim to advance readers' understanding of approaches to combine information from various data sources and realize benefits in terms of breadth and depth of data so that resulting research better informs decisionmakers.
The symposium and the supplement were funded by AHRQ (Contract No. 290-05-0016). Some of the specific studies were funded in part by AHRQ grants or contracts.
More details are in the journal supplement, "Methods for Developing and Analyzing Clinically Rich Data for Patient-centered Outcomes Research" edited by Sebastian Schneeweiss, Sc.D., M.D., M.S., and Scott R. Smith, Ph.D., M.S.P.H., R.Ph., in the May 2012 Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety 21(Suppl. S2), pp. 1-154. A limited number of copies of the supplement (Publication No. OM12-0043) are available from the AHRQ Publications Clearinghouse.

— DIL