A systematic review of real-world clinical practice data in COVID-19: non-interventional studies

Introduction. As defined by the Food and Drug Administration, real-world data (RWD) is data related to a patient's health and/or health care delivery, usually collected from various sources as part of real-world clinical practice research.

Objective: to describe the feasible and the most sought-after designs of non-interventional real-world clinical practice trials that provide evidence for the efficacy and safety of drug administration in the therapy of novel coronavirus infection.

Material and methods. A search strategy for the terms “COVID-19 AND real-life”, “COVID-19 AND real-data”, “COVID-19 AND real-world” was developed to extract articles published between December 1, 2020 and March 12, 2021 from the databases: PubMed/MEDLINE, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, and the ClinicalTrials.gov database.

Results. The search yielded 137 non-repetitive articles, 32 of them were included in the review. All randomized clinical trials (pragmatic and simplified large ones), studies of the effectiveness of laboratory diagnostic methods, medical triage, social distancing and other sanitary and epidemiological measures to cope with the epidemic were excluded.

Conclusion. High-quality, non-randomized RWD studies can enhance the external validity of registration randomized clinical trials by complementing them with a broader range of indicators, which is essential in supporting medical and public health decision-making in the COVID-19 pandemic. 

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