Newswise — Lawrenceville, NJ, USA—March 8, 2022—ISPOR—The Professional Society for Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) in partnership with the Bristol Myers Squibb-Pfizer Alliance announced that it has launched a new “About Real-World Evidence” microsite. This introductory content is designed for the broader healthcare audience toward the goal of engaging healthcare professionals in advancing best practices for the use of real-world evidence (RWE) in clinical decision making.
The increasing use of RWE to complement randomized controlled trial (RCT) data is one of the trends driving transformation in healthcare. RWE may allow healthcare providers to more effectively prevent, diagnose, and treat disease by providing insights on how various populations respond to a treatment in real-life, everyday settings. Ultimately, RWE can advance understanding of a patient’s real-world experiences while on medications and identify gaps in care, with the goal of helping to improve the overall patient journey.
The use of RWE is being considered in nearly every facet of the healthcare research environment, including pragmatic trials, regulatory decision making, value-based agreements, comparative effectiveness research, among many other applications. However, misunderstanding of RWE’s application in assessing the safety and effectiveness of drugs and treatments is still widespread.
Real-world data have the potential to complement RCT data by providing additional information about how a medicine performs in routine medical practice. While RWE offers tremendous potential, concerns exist such as biases that can result due to lack of randomization, insufficient uniform data quality, and the potential for “data mining” where analyses are conducted until the desired result is found. The Real-World Evidence Transparency Initiative has been working to address these concerns by establishing a culture of transparency for the analysis and reporting of RWE. A new Real-World Evidence Registry was developed out of this initiative.
“Building real-world evidence expertise across the entire healthcare continuum will be paramount as more stakeholders in this ecosystem are charged with understanding its uses and value,” said ISPOR’s Chief Science Officer, Richard J. Willke, PhD. “Advancing the use of real-world evidence is a critical aspect of ISPOR’s mission to promote health economics and outcomes research excellence to improve decision making for health, especially given the burgeoning availability and analysis of data from real-world sources.”
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ABOUT ISPOR
ISPOR, the professional society for health economics and outcomes research (HEOR), is an international, multistakeholder, nonprofit dedicated to advancing HEOR excellence to improve decision making for health globally. The Society is the leading source for scientific conferences, peer-reviewed and MEDLINE®-indexed publications, good practices guidance, education, collaboration, and tools/resources in the field.