Epidemiologic Research

Epidemiology is defined by the World Health Organization as the study of the distribution and determinants of health-related states, events, and disease, and the application of this study to the control of diseases and other health problems.

Pharmacoepidemiology, a subspecialty of epidemiology, uses epidemiological approaches to study the use, effectiveness, value, and safety of pharmaceutical products.

Epidemiological investigations are common research strategies to identify a disease outbreak, find the source of an outbreak, describe the distribution of illness or injury, and determine factors that modify risk. Epidemiological methods can be successfully applied when a clinical trial (the gold standard of medical research) is too impractical, expensive, or ethically challenging to conduct.

Epidemiological research methods can be applied to study broad, global populations as well as smaller, specific populations, such as:

• Healthy older adults
• The frail elderly
• Older adults with dementia or other chronic diseases
• Nursing home or assisted living residents

Rich troves of data exist in health systems, facility records, and government depositories that can be used to gain knowledge and understanding about patients, the chronic conditions that afflict them, or the medications they take.

Insight Therapeutics understands how to acquire and use existing data to glean answers to interesting health population questions. With our training in epidemiological and evaluation methodology and our experience analyzing secondary data sets from a variety of sources, we can help you answer your questions about populations of interest.

In recent years, Insight Therapeutics, through collaboration with industry and academia, has developed an approach to successful completion of pragmatic, cluster-randomized, clinical trials. Our approach uses customer service focused techniques to engage nursing homes to participate in large, comparative effectiveness trials. See our bibliography for additional information about how we do it and the successes we’ve achieved.