On 10 August, 2023, the SIGMA Consortium welcomed the Norwegian Institute of Public Health (NIPH) as its newest Member Organisation. The Pharmacoepidemiology research unit at the NIPH Department of Chronic Diseases is the largest pharmacoepidemiology research entity in Norway. The Team has extensive expertise and experience in pharmacoepidemiologic research covering a broad range of therapeutic areas and drug types, such as opioids, psychotropics, antidiabetics and drugs for other noncommunicable diseases. They work on safety studies on medicines, vaccines and biologics, including drug utilisation studies, pregnancy safety studies, and other analytic outcomes studies imposed by regulators (post-authorisation safety studies, PASS).
The NIPH runs the nationwide Norwegian Prescribed Drug Registry (NorPD), which they have been using since its inception in 2004. The NIPH team uses drug data linked to other relevant nationwide health and population registers available in Norway. These include medical birth registry, hospital registry, primary care registry, cancer registry, cause of death registry, socioeconomic data and more. They have also used the Norwegian Immunisation Registry on vaccinations, as well as linked the registry data to several large population-based health surveys and a national birth cohort study with biobanks. They have extensive knowledge on gaining access to and analysing the data, on data harmonisation and common data models (CDMs), as well as on the strengths and weaknesses of the different data sources. They have collaborated with researchers from several European countries as well as from Australia and the US. In addition, the NIPH team has experience working directly with person-level register data from other Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Iceland). Members of The SIGMA Consortium could not be more excited about this new addition and look forward to working with Drs. Øystein Karlstad, Ingvild Odsbu, Kari Furu and colleagues, and to benefiting from their valuable expertise in the field of pharmacoepidemiology and real-world evidence!
