Real world data and data science in medical research: present and future

Real world data (RWD) are generating greater interest in recent times despite being not new. There are various purposes of the RWD analytics in medical research as follows: effectiveness and safety of medical treatment, epidemiology such as incidence and prevalence of disease, burden of disease, quality of life and activity of daily living, medical costs, etc. The RWD research in medicine is a mixture of digital transformation, statistics or data science, public health, and regulatory science. Most of the articles describing the RWD or real-world evidence (RWE) in medical research cover only a portion of these specializations, which might lead to an incomplete understanding of the RWD. This article summarizes the overview and challenges of the RWD analysis in medical fields from methodological perspectives. As the first step for the RWD analysis, data source of the RWD should be comprehended. The progress of the RWD is closely related to the digitization, especially of medical administrative data and medical records. Second, the selection of appropriate statistical and epidemiological methods is highly critical for an RWD analysis than those for randomized clinical trials. This is because it contains greater varieties of bias, which should be controlled by balancing the underlying risk between treatment groups. Last, the future of the RWD is discussed in terms of overcoming limited data by proxy confounders, using unstructured text data, linking of multiple databases, using the RWD or RWE for a regulatory purpose, and evaluating values and new aspects in medical research brought by the RWD.