The gold standard of scientific evidence

That is the title of my latest article in Pharmaceutical Market Europe. An excerpt is below.

Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) are regarded as the gold standard of scientific evidence,
and for good reason. By randomizsing a treatment across study arms, RCTs eliminate patient-treamtent selection bias, resulting in reliable causal inference. In contrast, in the real world patients woh are sicker may be more (or less) likely ot receive certain treatments. Because treatments are given selectively, the true causal effect of a treatment on patient health in most real-world studies cannot be determined…Nevertheless, in recent years, there has been a call to increase the use of real-world evidence (RWE)…

The rest of the article discusses some of the limitations of RCTs and places where RWE can be used to help improve health care decision-making. Do read the whole article.

from Healthcare Economist http://ift.tt/2FFyrWU