The way patients and their caregivers share information on various online platforms about health topics and their own experiential knowledge presents new potential environments for research, particularly as concerns health products. The information provided individually and voluntarily by patients who are members of these online communities is a new resource for identifying and understanding precisely how health products are used, assessing their effectiveness, quantifying potential adverse effects in real-life situations, detecting subtle signs that are significant for experts in pharmacovigilance and addiction studies, and developing new assessment tools to help form new working hypotheses. How patients freely express their experiences and feelings and the reality of what they share also opens the way for societal research into health products, a field that is still under-explored.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe initiation of Horizon 2020--the European Union's 8th Framework Programme for Research and Innovation, allotted a budget of 79 billion euros--provides an opportunity to review France's participation in previous Framework Programmes. Indeed, French participation does not match either its scientific importance or its financial investment. While France contributed 16.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNon-interventional research is an essential approach to gathering data in different situations and it often complements other research methodologies, such as biomedical research and research aimed at evaluating usual care. Yet the legislative framework for this type of research is nonexistent, and this void poses a number of problems for non-interventional researchers, including an absence of any guarantee of quality and therefore of reliability, a limited recognition of the research beyond our borders, cumbersome administrative procedures, and a lack of visibility. In light of the growing demand for data, particularly in post marketing authorisation for drugs, which largely relies on non-interventional methods, the Round Table participants have issued a set of proposals for a future legislative framework for this type of research.
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