Helping everyone do better: a call for validation studies of routinely recorded health data

Abstract

Vera Ehrenstein,1 Irene Petersen,1,2 Liam Smeeth,3 Susan S Jick,4 Eric I Benchimol,5,6 Jonas F Ludvigsson,7,8 Henrik Toft Sørensen11Department of Clinical Epidemiology, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark; 2Department of Primary Care and Population Health, University College London, London, UK; 3Department of Non-Communicable Disease Epidemiology, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK; 4Boston Collaborative Drug Surveillance Program, Boston University School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA; 5Department of Pediatrics and School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine, Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, ON, Canada; 6Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Toronto, ON, Canada; 7Department of Medical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, 8Department of Pediatrics, University Hospital of Örebro, SwedenThere has been a surge of availability and use for research of routinely collected electronic health data, such as electronic health records, health administrative data, and disease registries. Symptomatic of this surge, in 2012, Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety (PDS) published a supplemental issue containing several reviews of validated methods for identifying health outcomes using routine health data,1 focusing on databases feeding the US Mini-Sentinel Program.2

Keywords

• epidemiology
• validation
• misclassification
• routine health data