ABSTRACT
The Harvard Medical School Brigham and Women’s Pharmacoepidemiology Program has been a collaborative effort to develop a linkage system specifically for use as a pharmacoepidemiology data base. As a hospital-based system it has been designed to incorporate all the data available within the hospital files. A data base on drug exposure requires detailed information about the individuals in order to be useful in epidemiologic research, especially so, considering the selected nature of drug prescribing. The computerized information on Brigham and Women’s patients is extensive. There are separate specialized automated databases maintained within the hospital, including files from surgical and autopsy pathology, microbiology, and obstetrics that can be merged with ours for specific purposes. In addition to the automated data base, complete medical records are available for review. The basic information is derived from the online data of the hospital’s computerized information system, which includes an automated pharmacy and an automated laboratory.
