Use Cases

The eHealth Initiative Foundation’s Connecting Communities for Drug Safety Collaboration has been utilizing a set of three "use cases" that have tested and evaluated the value and utility of blinded, anonymized, electronic clinical health information to detect and evaluate drug safety signals. Using clinical information — while protecting patients’ privacy — promises to accelerate the timeliness, accuracy, and effectiveness of methods currently used to monitor drug safety and facilitate healthcare system response.  Additional information on these use cases can be found in eHI Drug Safety Toolkit

Within this initial phase, the Collaboration participants in Indianapolis, IN and Boston, MA have tested and evaluated safety signals using a combination of clinical and administrative data for the following three use cases:

1. Use of cholesterol-lowering drugs and laboratory results related to liver injury  
2. Warfarin-related bleeding episodes
3. Designated medical events or "DMEs" (e.g., agranulocytosis, disseminated intravascular coagulation, toxic epidermal necrolysis, etc.)

The use cases were implemented using electronic information from clinical information systems only, administrative/claims system only, and then a combination of both types of data sets.
The goals of the Collaboration were to validate the feasibility, value and uniqueness of the clinical data for pharmacovigilance activities:

• Is it feasible? 
  • A methodology needs to be created and validated that screening of community data for safety and pharmacovigilance activities can be done
• How valuable is it?  How well can we serve consumers and providers?
  • Timeliness
  • Efficiency
  • Effectiveness
  • Preventing harm to patients
• How different is it from what we do today?

Diagram: Iterative Approach for Applying the Three Use Cases