Bundesgesundheitsblatt, Gesundheitsforschung, Gesundheitsschutz
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Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz · Jun 2004
Multicenter Study[Quality registries in cardiology].
Prospective registries performed in consecutive patients with frequent cardiac diseases and procedures are able to provide important information about therapies, complications, clinical outcome, and temporal trends in cardiology. Since 1992 all consecutive percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI) performed in over 80 hospitals of the ALKK (Arbeitsgemeinschaft Leitende Kardiologische Krankenhausärzte) have been centrally collected in a registry. This registry contains over 20% of all PCI procedures performed in Germany during the last 10 years. ⋯ A similar concept formed the basis for five consecutive registries in patients admitted with acute myocardial infarction. In these registries the participating investigators were asked to provide reasons for their treatment decisions, e. g., withholding guideline- adherent therapies. With this feature an increase in the use of guideline-adherent therapies could be observed, which was associated with an improvement in clinical outcome.
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Bundesgesundheitsblatt Gesundheitsforschung Gesundheitsschutz · Jun 2004
[Public health research with statutory health insurance drug data].
Major well-organized data sources about medical services are accumulated by statutory health insurance companies. These data are sufficiently representative of drug prescriptions and constitute a potential basis for pharmacoepidemiologic research. Especially for pharmacovigilance tasks or when political decisions have to be prepared, fast and reliable answers are often necessary. ⋯ The Gesetz zur Modernisierung der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (Law on Modernization of Statutory Health Insurance Companies of 14 November 2003) will induce important progress for the development and quality of pharmacoepidemiologic research using health insurance data. Probably in the future the analysis of such data will become-in addition to analyses of other data sources such as survey data-a substantial field of pharmacoepidemiology in Germany. This article describes the background and development of using routine data from health insurance companies for scientific purposes and discusses potentials and limitations of such data for public health research.