Review on use of German health insurance medication claims data for epidemiological research

Purpose The objective was to evaluate the use of German health insurance claims data on medications over the last 10 years by a review of published studies. Methods PubMed and Scopus were searched for relevant studies published in 1998 through 2007. Results A total of 70 studies were included. Use of these data increased from 32 reports (45.7%) between 1998 and 2005 to 38 (54.3%) over the last 2 years (2006-2007). Over half of the studies (57.1%; n = 40) were written in English and the most frequent research types were health service utilization (51.4%; n = 36) and cost analyses (18.6%; n = 13). In most of the studies (65.7%; n= 46), medication data were linked with other health care utilization claims (e.g. hospitalization data and physicians' outpatient services). Data validity was not taken into consideration in 40.6% (n = 13) of the 32 studies that also analysed hospitalization or physicians' outpatient diagnoses. Conclusions German health insurance medication claims data were increasingly used for research purposes over the last 10 years. Especially methodological and validation studies are clearly needed. Copyright (C) 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.