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Introduction
- Siu L. Hui, PhD
- Regenstrief Institute for Health Care; Indiana University Medical Center; Indianapolis, IN 46202 Note: This article is one of a series of articles comprising an Annals of Internal Medicine supplement entitled “Measuring Quality, Outcomes, and Cost of Care Using Large Databases: The Sixth Regenstrief Conference.” To see a complete list of the articles included in this supplement, please view its Table of Contents.
When we first held a Regenstrief Conference on large databases in 1989, health services research based on databases was relatively young. We were still identifying methodologic problems and trying to demonstrate the legitimacy of database research. There were plenty of skeptics who thought that database research should not be performed in most situations. Since then, huge databases have proliferated. The Medicare claims database has increased in great detail on some subsets of enrollees, large pharmaceutical benefits managers typically store billions of prescriptions in their databases each year, and …
