International journal of technology assessment in health care
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Int J Technol Assess Health Care · Jan 2010
Using clinical databases to evaluate healthcare interventions.
The aim of this study was to test the feasibility of conducting rigorous, nonrandomized studies (NRSs) of healthcare interventions using existing clinical databases in terms of the following: recruiting a large representative sample of hospitals, identifying eligible cases, matching cases to controls to achieve similar baseline characteristics, making meaningful comparisons of outcomes, and carrying out subgroup analyses. ⋯ Rigorous NRSs are feasible if they are based on data from high-quality clinical databases. However, the reliability of estimated treatment effects from such studies requires further investigation.