Seasonal changes in prescribing of long-acting beta-2-agonists-containing drugs

Base de Datos para la Investigación Farmacoepidemiológica en Atención Primaria (BIFAP): A data resource for pharmacoepidemiology in Spain

PURPOSE

Base de Datos para la Investigación Farmacoepidemiológica en Atención Primaria (BIFAP) is a population based database administered by the AEMPS (Spanish Agency for Medicines) of longitudinal electronic medical records (EMR) of patients attended in primary care. Its main purpose is to serve as source of information for independent studies on drug safety and support of medicines regulation activities. This article aim is to describe the characteristics of BIFAP, how to access the database and a summary of its potential for research.

METHODS

Health problems are registered by primary care physicians as episodes of care and include socio-demographic data, results of diagnostic procedures, lifestyle data, general data, and interventions. A proportion of data on hospitalizations and specialist care are currently available through linkage with other data sources. EMRs of the Spanish healthcare system are provided by the regional administrations. Specific data extraction and standardization processes are performed.

RESULTS

BIFAP includes data from 12 million patients starting in 2001 and updated annually. Validation of drug and diagnosis definitions has been ascertained. Participation in international collaborative projects and a number of articles in peer reviewed journals reflect its contribution to the knowledge of the risks associated with medicines and drug utilization patterns.

CONCLUSIONS

BIFAP is a useful tool for generating scientific evidence on medicines related issues, helping regulatory decision making in Europe. The main strengths of BIFAP are related to large sample size, population-based, longitudinal nature and annual update of data. BIFAP shares common challenges with similar data sources including accurate and efficient identification of health outcomes and of treatment exposure.

The IMI PROTECT project: purpose, organizational structure, and procedures

The Pharmacoepidemiological Research on Outcomes of Therapeutics by a European ConsorTium (PROTECT) initiative was a collaborative European project that sought to address limitations of current methods in the field of pharmacoepidemiology and pharmacovigilance. Initiated in 2009 and ending in 2015, PROTECT was part of the Innovative Medicines Initiative, a joint undertaking by the European Union and pharmaceutical industry. Thirty-five partners including academics, regulators, small and medium enterprises, and European Federation of Pharmaceuticals Industries and Associations companies contributed to PROTECT. Two work packages within PROTECT implemented research examining the extent to which differences in the study design, methodology, and choice of data source can contribute to producing discrepant results from observational studies on drug safety. To evaluate the effect of these differences, the project applied different designs and analytic methodology for six drug-adverse event pairs across several electronic healthcare databases and registries. This papers introduces the organizational structure and procedures of PROTECT, including how drug-adverse event and data sources were selected, study design and analyses documents were developed, and results managed centrally.