[Public health research with statutory health insurance drug data].

Major well-organized data sources about medical services are accumulated by statutory health insurance companies. These data are sufficiently representative of drug prescriptions and constitute a potential basis for pharmacoepidemiologic research. Especially for pharmacovigilance tasks or when political decisions have to be prepared, fast and reliable answers are often necessary. These can be generated utilizing health insurances' databases. Legal requirements for the analysis of data from medical services in the framework of research projects are described in Article 287 of the SGB V (Code of Social Law Book V). An increasing number of such projects were conducted during the last few years. The Gesetz zur Modernisierung der gesetzlichen Krankenversicherung (Law on Modernization of Statutory Health Insurance Companies of 14 November 2003) will induce important progress for the development and quality of pharmacoepidemiologic research using health insurance data. Probably in the future the analysis of such data will become-in addition to analyses of other data sources such as survey data-a substantial field of pharmacoepidemiology in Germany. This article describes the background and development of using routine data from health insurance companies for scientific purposes and discusses potentials and limitations of such data for public health research.