The Inaugural Ross-Royall Symposium:
From Individuals to Populations
Wood Basic Sciences Auditorium
Friday, February 26, 2016
8:30 am – 6:00 pm
Sebastian Schneeweiss, M.D., S.M., Sc.D.
Professor, Department of Epidemiology, Harvard Medical School and
Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharamacoeconomics, Brigham and
Women’s Hospital
Title:
Comparative Effectiveness of Treatments in Large Healthcare Databases – the Value of
High-Dimensional Propensity Score Approaches
Abstract:
Large longitudinal healthcare databases, including insurance claims data and EHR
systems represent health information gathered during routine care. They offer an
opportunity to understand the real-world effectiveness of therapeutics.
On the flipside, such data were not collected for research and concerns arise that relevant
confounders were not observed. Yet, in the available longitudinal data stream an
abundance of confounder proxies can be defined creating a high-dimensional covariate
space. Hd-PS has proven to be a useful data adaptive tool to maximize and largely
automate covariate adjustment in healthcare databases. The presentation will explain the
principles of hd-PS and provide results from empirical examples and simulation studies.