David Hadorn, Centre for the Study of Assessment and Prioritisation in Health, University of Otago
UBC CHSPR Public Seminar
Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm
414 - 2194 Health Sciences Mall (Instructional Resources Centre), UBC *please note location*
Interest is growing in the use of population-level databases for assessing health outcomes and treatment effectiveness. However, certain issues require further attention before outcome differences observed in such databases can be confidently attributed to treatments, including (1) the development of appropriate standards of data accuracy and completeness, including audit protocols and (2) the creation of agreed methods for dealing with such analytic challenges as missing data and confounding variables.
A new body, the International Health Data Linkage Network (IHDLN -headquartered in Perth, Australia) will be holding sessions at the upcoming MCHP meeting in Winnipeg (March 8-9). Among the topics to be discussed is whether and how to encourage the use of observational
databases for outcomes research, including whether IHDLN should consider developing guidelines concerning the above (and related) issues. I will summarize this discussion and its implications for further progress in this area. I will also provide a brief summary of current database research in New Zealand.e systems.
David Hadorn, M.D., Ph.D. is a former emergency physician who changed careers after completing a fellowship in health services research at RAND in 1991. He worked at CHSPR and BCOHTA prior to moving to New Zealand in 1993, where he currently serves as director of the Centre for the Study of Assessment and Prioritisation in Health at the University of Otago School of Medicine in Wellington.
For more information, see http://www.uow.otago.ac.nz/academic/dph/research/cap/index.html
David has a long-standing interest in the use of observational databases as sources of information on treatment effectiveness. He hopes this seminar and related discussions will lead to a project linking database research activities in Canada and New Zealand.
