| Amazon suggests products you might like based on your past purchases or those of buyers similar to you. Netflix recommends movies you might like, while TripAdvisor puts forward appealing travel destinations. But when it comes to health care, how can we know which treatments will work best for us? Our past medical history or that of patients like us might yield clues, but how do we get that information? That information, collected from everyday health care experiences, is known as real-world data and is growing in availability. However, advanced analytics and methods are needed to make sense of this data to create real-world evidence, or RWE. Many health care decisions are made based on randomized controlled trials, which take place in highly controlled settings and may not reflect the experience of the average patient. In other scenarios, information from randomized controlled trials may not exist. But as we seek to transition to a learning health care system, it’s critical to take lessons everywhere we can find them—in communities and clinics, in patients’ homes and nursing homes, in laboratories and living rooms. ... |