Drug Outcomes Research

Lewis NJ, Patwell IT, Briesacher BA. The role of insurance claims databases in drug therapy outcomes research. Pharmacoeconomics 1993 4 323-30. 

Gossop M, Marsden J, Stewart D, Lehmann P, Edwards C, Wilson A Segar G (1998). Substance use, health and social problems of service users at 54 drug treatment agencies intake data from the National Treatment Outcome Research Study. British Journal of Psychiatry, 173, 166-71... 

Patterns of improvement after methadone treatment One year follow-up results from the National Treatment Outcome Research Study (NTORS). Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 60, 275-86... 

Gossop M, Marsden J, Stewart D Kidd T (2003). The National Treatment Outcome Research Study (NTORS) 4-5 year followup results. Addiction, 98, 291-303 Gossop M, Stewart D Marsden J (2006). Effectiveness of drugs and alcohol counselling during methadone treatment content, frequency, and duration of counselling and association with substance use outcomes. Addiction, 101, 404-12... 

Third, neither the subjects nor the researcher should know who received the real drug or the placebo. If they know, it could bias the outcomes. Patients might expect to get better because they receive the real drug, and researchers might expect those patients to get better. The design is called double-blind because both patients and researchers do not know the membership in the experimental and control groups until after the outcomes have been measured. 

Additional research efforts conducted at the Medical Affairs divisions of pharmaceutical companies include the study of Health Economics and Clinical Outcomes Research, which examines the effect of drugs on the cost of healthcare delivery, as... 

Very few examples of outcomes research in neurological pharmacy exist. However, one historical control study determined that the implementation of a pharmacokinetics consultation service in an epilepsy clinic decreased seizure frequency and number of adverse effects compared with the baseline frequency in the 4 months prior to offering the service.A second study conducted in the pediatric epilepsy population described the effect of establishment of a specialty pediatric epilepsy clinic with clinical pharmacy services. Compared with patients seen before the beginning of the clinic, patients seen in the specialty clinic had decreased numbers of antiepileptic drugs and decreased doses of these medications. Frequency of seizures was not examined in this report. 

Oversee cancer drug preparation and dispensing in patient care settings Direct patient care Investigational drug services Research Drug information Educational instruction Outcomes assessment Pharmaceutical industry Medical communications... 

The management of a drug on the market is a professional challenge for which no medical school trains its physicians. The overall process and skill is an important part of the training within the speciality of pharmaceutical medicine. This effort may include the issues of quality-of-life evaluations, together with the appropriate development of evidence-based medicine, of outcomes research and of cost-utility sciences. All of these are techniques needed within pharmaceutical medicine. Used appropriately, they can help not only to establish the curative value of a new medicine but also to ensure that the therapy gets delivered optimally. 

In recent years pharmacoeconomics has been used as a term to describe the identification, measurement and comparison of the costs and consequences of pharmaceutical products and services (Bootman et al 1996). As such, pharmacoeconomics focuses primarily on pharmaceuticals, and attempts to evaluate the economic and humanistic impact of drug therapy. Pharmacoeconomic tools are derived from a variety of sources, including the fields of economics and outcomes research. Quite often the pharmacoeconomist will bring to the development team skills and experience in quality of life, patient satisfaction and other patient-centered measures. Health economists and a pharmacoeco-nomists differ (while the terms are sometimes used interchangeably), in having stronger backgrounds in the theoretical and applied aspects of health economics, respectively. A researcher with solid... 

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