“I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.”
Isaac Asimov
Welcome to My Real-World Evidence
The site provides access to RWE resources and tools for healthcare research in a way that I hope is clear and meaningful.
RWE and effectiveness are one of the same
The primary knowledge object of RWE in healthcare is effectiveness, or the extent to which a specific healthcare intervention, when deployed in the usual circumstances, does what it is intended to do.
A growing interest in RWE
The first reference I found in Pubmed (a database of references in life sciences) to the term “real-world evidence” dates back to 1998, where, in an article, Caro & Speckman noted that “Patient behavior in randomized controlled trials differs from that in actual practice; studies of this difference are therefore required to consider real-world evidence”
Since then, Pubmed has included more than 6,000 references with the term ‘real-world evidence’. The vast majority of the terms appear from 2014 to the present (99%), following a clear arithmetic progression (see figure below), a clear indicator of the growing interest in the subject.
RWE, a new scientific field
Today, RWE is an inter-disciplinary field in its own right. It draws on methods from other scientific disciplines (e.g. epidemiology, data science, and biostatistics), meaning that RWE practitioners have at their disposal a wide variety of methods and tools to generate evidence in healthcare.
Disclaimer
The content of these pages is neither exhaustive nor authoritative. It is simply information that I found useful at some point and that I want to share in case someone finds it interesting.
This is a young and evolving project to which I am dedicating part of my free time. Please be understanding if you notice any errors or omissions.
If you think that I could improve it in any way, please let me know.