The future of federally funded research at Harvard Medical School — supported by taxpayers and done in service to humanity — remains uncertain. Learn more.
Harvard Medical School researchers are developing new methods to use existing real-world data such as health insurance claims to emulate randomized clinical trials, allowing them to examine how existing medicines perform on under-studied groups of people and on medical conditions that were not part of the original trial.
Randomized clinical trials remain the gold standard for establishing a medication’s effects, producing the evidence by which most drugs and interventions in the United States are approved. But these studies typically require large numbers of patients, huge amounts of data, and thorough follow-ups, none of which comes easy or free. The upshot is fewer investigations into scenarios that are clinically important but unlikely to yield a profit for the firms funding them. These new techniques could save patients from falling through the cracks.