Second Look at Responder Characteristics of RWD/RWE Survey

As anyone who follows my LinkedIn posts knows, I’ve been fielding a survey on pain points associated with identifying, evaluating, and analyzing real-world data (RWD) sources to generate real-world evidence (RWE). The survey is informal, brief, and completely anonymous. It will remain open through the upcoming ISPOR meeting in May and be used to support a workshop session (#102) on regulatory submissions of RWE. ??

If you still haven’t completed the survey, you can access it here.

A couple weeks ago, we took a first look at survey responder characteristics, showing the breakdown by professional affiliation. This post contains a second look, this time showing responses to the following question:?

“Approximately how many analyses of secondary RWD have you performed during the past five years?”

Categorical responses were as follows: “None”; “1-5”; “6-19”; “20-49”; “50+”.

Omitting the few “None” responders, the current experience distribution appears as:

We can see that, by and large, the survey respondents have extensive experience analyzing secondary RWD sources like claims and EHRs, as only a small minority (15.7%) report fewer than six studies over the past five years. That means that most respondents are performing multiple studies every year, including 13.7% in the “50+” category who are averaging 10 or more annually.

Once again, we can ask the question, does this breakdown accurately represent the broader population of RWD researchers? There’s no way of knowing, but I suppose one might argue that my personal network is overweighted with RWD “power users” and others with heavy involvement in RWE generation. If so, researchers in the 1-5 category might be underrepresented.?

Other hypotheses or thoughts on the experience distribution? Feel free to voice your opinions in the comments.

Thanks!