STAT May 19, 2020
The Food and Drug Administration said Tuesday that it will launch a new research project focused on real-world evidence — data collected by insurance companies, in electronic health records, and in other places in medicine — to learn more about Covid-19, including how diagnostics and medications are being used in the pandemic and how best to design studies to test them.
The project is a collaboration with Aetion, a New York health tech startup that specializes in real-world evidence.
“Right now, I think that the most intriguing part of the Aetion story is the ability to have a very consistent analytic approach that can be applied across multiple datasets,” Amy Abernethy, the FDA’s principal deputy commissioner, said in an interview....