In early September, Dresden was the venue of a joint conference of five German medical associations, enabling cross-sectional knowledge sharing across a range of scientific expertise. This was the first time the five societies German Society for Medical Informatics, Biometry and Epidemiology (GMDS), German Society for Social Medicine and Prevention (DGSMP), German Society for Epidemiology (DGEpi), German Society for Medical Sociology (DGMS), German Society for Public Health (DGPH) came together to exchange ideas and learnings in their respective fields. Almost 2000 scientists attended the conference and discussed topics such as discussed topics related to epidemiology, health technology assessment and public health such as gender, planetary/environmental health, artificial intelligence, and patient involvement.
Real4Reg well-represented at the conference
Of the Real4Reg consortium, four colleagues from BfArM and DZNE attended the conference. In total, they presented one poster and gave three oral presentations, three of which involved Real4Reg specifically. A presentation on the safety profile of fluoroquinolones gave an outlook on UC3 in Real4Reg, which will contribute to research on this topic. Two contributions focused exclusively on results from the Real4Reg project: The poster and one of the presentations concerned the results of our Real4Reg survey to stakeholders around their use, views and needs for Real-World Evidence.
Patients’ and physicians’ views on Real-World Evidence (RWE)
The poster presentation focused on the survey to patients and physicians. Conference participants got an insight into the concerns of those groups relating to the usage of their health data – patients were most concerned about data privacy and professional training on RWE use, while physicians also highlighted the risk of misinterpretation of study results. One key learning from the survey is the need for RWE training concepts tailored to medical professionals and patients. We also identified the RWE topics with highest training need through a skill gap analysis.
Academia, payers, regulators, industry and HTA
The oral presentation gave insights into other important stakeholders’ needs. Through three tailored questionnaires, our survey was also aimed towards
- Pharmaceutical industry and Regulatory/HTA bodies,
- Academia and
- Payers.
Learning about current usage of RWE is helping Real4Reg to develop training and guidance concepts that are highly relevant for individuals involved in the field of RWE. Importantly, we saw that interest in both training and guidance concepts was large across all surveyed groups. We could identify several technical and systemic barriers to RWE use and aim to address them throughout the Real4Reg project.
Outlook
Thanks to all our survey participants, we were able to shape a comprehensive picture of stakeholders’ needs and views on RWE, which will guide our future work in the project. By presenting the results in Dresden, we shared the learnings with other scientists, to help them improve their research. We will publish the full survey results comprehensively in the future, so that all interested parties can get the maximum benefit from them.
Photo credits: Martin Russek, Julia Wicherski.