Pharmacoepidemiology and COVID-19

COVID-19 has caused a major challenge globally in various dimensions of people’s lives. As the disease spreads around the world, many questions have been raised about it which need to be answered. Our research group as an academic center strives to find the right answers to the unknowns about the COVID-19.

These days we are involved in two main projects: The first project, is called SCIFI-PEARL (Swedish covid-19 investigation for future insights – a population epidemiology approach using register linkage), aims to answer the questions about COVID19 in both epidemiology- and pharmacoepidemiology fields. The study includes all known COVID-19 patients diagnosed in Sweden in the study in addition to a large general population as control group. Linking different Swedish health system registers to the COVID-19 patients dataset creates a tremendous opportunity to investigate the effect of COVID-19 on the community.

The second project is called Nordic COHERENCE (Nordic COllaborative HEalth REgister Network for Covid-19 Epidemiology). Three Nordic countries: Denmark, Norway, Sweden; and Scotland are involved in this project. The project is focused on risk factors for severe Covid-19 (i.e. disease leading to hospitalization, intensive care or fatal outcome), identifying vulnerable populations and characterizing the disease course due to COVID-19. Additionally, the effects of the pandemic on drug and healthcare utilization in the general population will be assessed. In the project, a Common Data Model (CDM) approach previously tested on Nordic healthcare data, and analytics combining data science and state-of-the-art epidemiological methods will be used. A machine learning method for hypothesis generation and test findings will be used as well.

In summary, although we are involved in different projects of COVID-19 pandemic, still open for any new ideas and welcome all people who are interested to work with us.

For more information please contact Hossein Hajiebrahimi or Björn Wettermark.