Dr. Ameet Bakhai, a cardiologist at Royal London Hospital, discusses his recent publication about a nationally representative retrospective study looking at the management of patients with nonvalvular atrial fibrillation, including more than 43,000 patients over 5 years.
Conducted with the real world data from times of changing guidelines and new oral anticoagulants, this study provided a unique snapshot of the clinical, therapeutic and economic outcome data for a large number of patients. Major insights were gathered by comparing outcomes in patients receiving different therapies and those receiving no therapy. Temporal trends in prescribing different treatment options were also observed and these trends can be further used to evaluate national campaigns.
Real-world data also provides insights into patient groups that are commonly underrepresented in clinical trial settings. In the future these data can be used to evaluate resource and budget allocation and provide us with the exploratory data we need for designing and conducting experimental research.