The IPCI database participated in the largest, most extensive global network study on background rates for adverse events of special interest and identifies important age, sex and database differences that should inform future safety surveillance efforts. Led by researchers at Oxford University, Columbia University, Erasmus MC, UCLA, and Janssen, an international team of collaborators within the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) network provided a timely reference of the background rates of AESIs in the recent study “Characterising the background incidence rates of adverse events of special interest for covid-19 vaccines in eight countries: multinational network cohort study” published June 14 by The BMJ.

While fatality was fortunately rare, complications including hospitalization, hypoxemia and pneumonia were more frequent in children and adolescents either diagnosed or hospitalized with COVID-19 than with seasonal influenza. Furthermore, labored breathing, loss of smell and gastrointestinal issues were more prevalent symptoms for younger people inflicted with COVID-19 than with influenza. These findings, along with that of significant treatment heterogeneity for children/adolescents hospitalized with COVID-19, were presented in the study “30-day outcomes of Children and Adolescents with COVID-19: An International Experience,” published May 28 by Pediatrics.

The IPCI database participated in a study on the Validation of the COVID-19 Vulnerability (C-19) Index across an international network of observational healthcare datasets, published today in JMIR Med Inform. Our results show that the discriminative performance of the C-19 index model is low for influenza cohorts and even worse among patients with COVID-19 in the United States, Spain, and South Korea.

The European Medicines Agency (EMA) has signed a contract with IQVIA in partnership with Erasmus University Medical Center, together with partners from 6 European countries to investigate the treatment patterns on the use of ranitidine and alternatives of ranitidine. For this study, all clinical data are standardised to the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) -Common Data Model, which is maintained by the Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI) community (www.ohdsi.org). The use of the OMOP-CDM enables standardised analytics, tools, and methodologies.