Drug utilization research on pharmacy prescription data If data are large, does that also mean they are big?

Over the last decade or so, a rapid digitalization has taken place across industries. This has also had influenced the healthcare industry, resulting in increased importance of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) and an increased use in Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) and innovative, smart devices, either wearable or hand held, that may generate data for or about patients, or to support health care professionals. The application of Big Data analytics in healthcare has a large potential to improve the quality and to reduce the cost of care. Also, it represents an opportunity to reduce waste caused by underutilization of data, and to reduce error in existing data.
Drug Utilization Research can be considered an application of Big Data analytics in healthcare. It consists of descriptive and analytical methods related to the quantification, understanding and evaluation of the processes of prescribing, dispensing and consumption of medicines, and for the testing of interventions to enhance the quality of these processes.
The main source of data and information in the pharmacy is the Pharmacy Information System. This system contains records of all medication dispensed to patients and is present in every pharmacy in The Netherlands. In this thesis, we work with pharmacy prescription data from the NControl database. NControl is an organisation that provides services to independent pharmacies based on information from the pharmacy information system.
The ambition at NControl was to create the largest database of pharmaceutical prescription data in the Netherlands. For this purpose, the organisation collects data from over 800 individual public pharmacies in the country and combines them in the NControl database, that can be accessed by analysts for analytical and scientific purposes with relatively ease, and within a week of the date in which the prescription took place.
In this thesis, we explore in how far data from the pharmacy information system can contribute to the purposes of improving quality of care and reducing waste and cost of care mentioned above, and answer questions that are common in the field of Drug Utilization Research.