Major advances in international pharmacoepidemiology

Pharmacoepidemiology applies the principles of epidemiology to the problems of pharmacotherapy--particularly addressing society's need to know more about drug safety issues than the highly structured pre-approval clinical trials programs can provide. Thus, the concerns are truly international, and the approaches must also be international, tempered by the ability to generalize from one nation's experience, and by the availability of specialized research resources. Studying the impact of medical and medicinal interventions, the field is especially well-served by the major advances in computer system's support of medical settings and the multipurpose linked automated data base, linking automated pharmacy-dispensing data with same-population automated hospital discharge and other medical and demographic data. The development of such resources, the direction of their fruits to complement the hard work of hands-on traditional epidemiologic approaches in this field, the recruitment and support of trained researchers in the field, and the international coordination of policy and practice realistic to the capacity while responsive to the demand are all among the exciting challenges ahead.