Abstract

Background: It is broadly recognized that health policy and decisions not often reflect research evidence. Healthcare database analyses (e.g. claims, electronic health records, pharmacy records) have been identified as important sources to generate evidence on the effectiveness, harm, and value of medical products in clinical practice. Hence, it is vital to determine if available healthcare databases have been used to improve evidence-informed decision-making at country level. Objectives: This study aims to describe available databases on pharmaceutical use and to identify studies that specifically used those databases to generate research for informed decision-making in Chile. Methods: The strategy to develop this study was based on the following framework: i. building capacity and; ii. scoping review of the literature and governmental websites. I. The network of researchers included academic experts in Pharmacoepidemiology, members of the government and health regulatory agencies ii. The researchers made a scoping review based on previous knowledge of the team members, using scientific literature databases, from inception to December 2019; researchers included grey literature. Two researchers independently screened eligible pharmaceutical databases and checked any study or document. Possible divergences were analyzed by a third researcher. The pharmaceutical databases were characterized for accessibility, coverage granularity, provider, type of data sources, and setting. The selected documents and studies were characterized by design, type of data generated, funding and accessibility. Results: Eleven pharmaceutical databases were identified, of those, only 4 (36%) are partially publicly and conveniently accessible. The access is limited or only accessed by researcher working in the institution; 4 databases (36%) include data from both sectors public and private health; the majority of data (5 databases) is provided by patient record information and only one has data from pharmacy records. Also, only three databases provide data from ambulatorial setting. 94 documents were retrieved that analyse data from 6 (67%) of pharmaceutical databases in Chile. Conclusions: Although Chile's government could organize data provided by users of healthcare, there is poor production of national data used for decision making. Increasing healthcare database accessibility and implementing the network capacity building could improve evidence-informed decision-making.