Assess treatment utilization and patterns in specific medical conditions in clinical practice

Focused clinical conditions: acute myocardial infarction, diabetes and hypertension

Objectives: 1) To measure and  quantify treatment utilization including patterns and variations in population and by subgroups such as age groups, gender, clinical distinct subgroups, and across small geographic areas; 2) To understand factors associated with treatment variations.

Investigate the real-world treatment effects (effectiveness and safety) and comparative treatment effects on patient-centered outcomes

Objectives: To identify optimal treatment regimen for patient population and subgroups, which will balance the benefit and risk. To provide evidence to support clinical treatment decision and healthcare policy decision to improve the quality of care.

Develop, validate and enhance advanced analytical methods to investigate real-world treatment effects

Objectives: To develop and enhance advanced analytical methods - "tools" to address confounding (e.g. confounding by indication and unmeasured confounding) problems that bias estimated treatment effects and may lead to wrong clinical inference and treatment decision when using observational data from large healthcare utilization databases. To assess the validity of various analytical methods to generate unbiased treatment effects. To develop theoretical models to appropriately interpret estimates of treatment effects of various analytical methods when treatment effects are heterogeneous in the study population and methods to identify the clinical distinct patient subgroups to whom the estimates of treatment effects from the analytical methods can be applied.