Presentation (CTI)

OBJECTIVES: The Échantillon du Système National des Données de Santé (ESND) is a 2% representative sample of the French nationwide healthcare insurance database. It was introduced in October 2022 as a replacement for the Échantillon Général des Bénéficiaires (EGB), a 1/97 random sample available for research since 2011. This study aims to describe the characteristics of studies using the EGB, trends, and key research areas, to set up the basis of use expectations of ESND.
METHODS: ScienceDirect and PubMed (August 2024) were searched for EGB/ESND-based studies (January 2011-July 2024) using a comprehensive search strategy. Articles were manually screened for eligibility by two reviewers. Study objectives, therapeutic areas, treatments, study design and publication years were summarized descriptively.
RESULTS: 204 unique studies were included. Objectives were distributed as follows: 100 (48%) focused on pharmacoepidemiology, 51 (25%) on characterizing populations or diseases, and 53 (27%) on healthcare resource utilization and costs. Pharmacoepidemiologic studies mainly examined drug utilization (70%), pharmacovigilance (21%), drug effectiveness (7%), and drug-drug interactions (2%). In studies characterizing populations or diseases, 78% were descriptive and 24% comparative. Among 124 certain disease focused studies, most common conditions at inclusion were diseases of circulatory system (20%), musculoskeletal/connective tissue (15%), respiratory system (13%), endocrine, nutritional and metabolic diseases (13%), and neoplasm (11%). Of 118 studies that assessed specific drugs, psycholeptics (11%), analgesics (9%), and diabetes drugs (9%) were most common. Study designs were 67% cohort, 26% cross-sectional, and 7% case-control. The number of publications peaked between 2016 and 2018, with 43% of articles published during this period.
CONCLUSIONS: With facilitated data access, the EGB database has been widely used to inform research in the fields of clinical epidemiology and pharmacoepidemiology particularly in non-rare conditions and exposures. This overview offers a sneak-peek into the future use of the larger ESND sample.