[Pharmacoepidemiology. Analysis of drug prescription data].

Due to an increase in pharmaceutical expenditure and growing demands on the observation and analysis of the pharmaceutical use in the overall population, pharmacoepidemiology has increasingly gained importance. In the foreground of this scientific discipline is the analysis of drug use in every day treatment; pharmaceutical prescription data are a suitable data source as they are part of the health care routine. In Germany prescription data are collected as process data of the Statutory Health Insurance (GKV) under naturalistic conditions and are for this reason not distorted by study designs nor artificial survey conditions. The contribution at hand states the most common data sources und gives an overview on the character of pharmaceutical prescription data, their information content and how they can be used for scientific research. The prevailing study designs which are applied in pharmacoepidemiologic surveys and the prevalent methodological approaches of the pharmaceutical appliance research on the basis of secondary GKV data are presented. Furthermore, an outlook is given on Pharmacoepidemiological Databases (PDb) that are already well-established in other countries and possibilities will be shown for monitoring drug utilization and turnover.