The World Health Organization is marking a global week to raise peoples’ awareness on drug safety, known as “MedSafetyWeek”, from November 6 to 12. This important initiative aims at informing the public about the importance of safe and correct use of medicines.
On this occasion, we are proud to highlight our paper recently published in the prestigious scientific journal Drug Safety as a result of research conducted by the “Uppsala Monitoring Centre”, which acts as a WHO Collaborating Centre within the WHO Program for International Drug Monitoring. This study focused on the use of routinely collected health data to improve the recognition of adverse drug effects, highlighting international collaboration and the importance of aggregated data in pharmacovigilance.
The data mapped to the OMOP CDM (Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership Common Data Model) standard were used for this pioneering endeavour, which allowed us to systematize and analyse information from various health databases, including those from primary, secondary and tertiary healthcare facilities level.
The research included databases of healthcare facilities from five countries: Great Britain, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands and Serbia. We are especially proud of the contribution of our country, where three healthcare centres – the University Clinical Centre of Serbia (UKCS), the University Clinical Centre of Niš and the Zvezdara Clinical Hospital Centre, together with the company “Heliant”, which is certified for mapping health data on OMOP CDM, were part of the research within the EHDEN project.
The main conclusion of the study is that the analysis of standardized health data from a distributed network of different countries enables not only the validation but also the prioritization of safety signals concerning adverse drug effects. This type of analysis is invaluable in optimizing patient safety and improving public health globally.
You can read the whole paper here. The study can be of great benefit to healthcare professionals and the general public interested in drug safety aspects.