Gold Standard: Standardizing RWD

This article is from our latest ' Trends in Real-World Evidence ' magazine.  Download for free.A Herculean task?The banking industry – often compared to healthcare due to similar levels of regulation – may offer some insight, says Hassan Chaudhury, Director and Co-founder at Health iQ.“Citibank manages untold billions and makes sure that credit flows through from, say, New York to London. They need to track credit, use different systems and have regulators using different systems, as well as talk to different lenders. They all work with each other in microseconds and on differe nt platforms.”If banks can do it, why not healthcare? “The financial system has a finite number of currencies, essentially a common variable set (for example, US dollars of British pounds) and diversity in systems,” says Hughes.“In healthcare, hardly anyone is capturing raw data the same way, and the variable set for healthcare, based on such heterogeneity of disease, is a vast voluminous array of variables, collected in an almost infinite way.”One lesson from banking is the use of common data models (CDMs). According to the European Medicines Agency (EMA), which held a workshop late last year on the feasibility of CDMs in European healthcare, such models are “a mechanism by which raw data are standardized to a common structure, format and terminology independently from any particular study in order to allow a combined analysis across several databases/datasets.”Some notable CDMs s...
Source: EyeForPharma - Category: Pharmaceuticals Authors: Source Type: news