About

Medicines have a major impact on health and wellbeing. However, it is also important to recognize the problems of inappropriate drug use which have demonstrated the need for drug utilization research, a cross-disciplinary and multi-professional science with the aim to describe and understand the use of medicines in the society. The introductory presentation on Future Trends in Drug Utilization Research aims to give an overview of current trends and what kind of drug utilization studies that will be needed in the future to address the growing pressures on all healthcare systems with aging populations, rising patient expectations, stricter clinical targets, and expensive new medicines.

The use of computerized databases has greatly facilitated studies of drug utilization. Over the years more and more data have become available in registries, claims databases and medical records. Today, we face a rapid growth of data coming from other sources, and the term “big data” has been used to refer to data sets that are too large or complex for traditional data-processing application software to adequately deal with. Considerable amounts of healthcare data are generated every day, some of them from data sources to large extent unexplored or unused in drug utilization research such as clinical records systems, mail traffic, social media and various devices. Even though new computer techniques and machine learning have been developed, there are still many challenges such as how to deal with missing data, unstructured data, poor data validity and interoperability. The new opportunities and challenges will be explored in the session Drug Utilization Research in the Era of Big Data.