31 August 2019 - As medicines become more numerous and often more expensive, health care professionals seek new ways to understand which treatments are most likely to yield the best outcomes at sustainable costs.

The so-called learning healthcare system paradigm, an approach to using healthcare data to personalise care, reduce costs, and optimise resources, has been the subject of increased attention in recent years, and in 2012, a group of teaching hospitals in the Netherlands undertook construction of such a system as a means to benchmark the prescribing of biosimilar medicines and to assess how novel therapies impact survival in oncology patients in their system.

Researchers from the clinical pharmacy departments of these hospitals reported on their efforts in a paper in the European Journal of Hospital Pharmacy. The authors explain that the group of 7 hospitals, which together provide care to approximately 13% of the Dutch population, extracts data on a weekly basis from electronic health records that are used in routine clinical care.

Read Center for Biosimilars article