Our strengths

The PMV research group has many years of experience in scientific work with claims data of different health insurance companies as well as secondary data from other sectors. We are pleased to be able to say that we are one of the pioneers of health care research with claims data in Germany.

For more than 30 years, we have been preparing claims data, checking them for plausibility and analysing them for a wide range of research questions. In doing so, we work both with pseudonymised data from various health insurance companies and with existing evaluation databases. With the sample of insured persons AOK Hessen/KV Hessen and the research database of the Cologne Research Network, we were significantly involved in the development of two such databases.

An efficient and secure data management is also very important for us. We have expertise in setting up data infrastructures, both technically and organizationally. Encryption and pseudonymisation are as much a part of our daily work as data linkage.

We use this knowledge not only for our own work, but also make it available to a wide range of organisations from health insurance companies and other research institutions to the governments of other European member states.

From drug treatment safety to last year's care to digital care: the PMV research group deals with almost the complete spectrum of health care topics. Many of these topics have been part of our work for years, especially diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, musculoskeletal diseases, cancer and mental illness.

One focus is also the investigation of drug consumption in different indications and for different population groups - children, pregnant women or elderly people. We have also been researching multimorbidity and geriatrics for a long time. In recent years, palliative care, dental care and various special topics related to the care of children have been added. And we are always open to new topics.

In all these fields we are interested in the course of illness and care, the use of services, the quality of care and its costs. When evaluating innovative forms of care, we look at clinical effectiveness and cost-effectiveness, but also at the parameters that contribute to a sustainable care model.

Propensity Score Matching, Inverse Probability Weighting, Interrupted-Time-Series-Analysis, Cost-Benefit-Analyses, logistic regressions, non-linear methods
… our spectrum of analytical methods is as broad as the topics we work on. And as with the topics we work on, we always look forward to adding new approaches to our pool of knowledge.

Depending on the research question and available data, we select the appropriate approach and perform cross-sectional or longitudinal studies, case-control, (historical) cohort or quasi-experimental designs. This also applies to data management, data preparation and plausibility checks, pseudonymisation and encryption, and data linkage.

In addition to the current literature, our methodological work is guided by good practice secondary data analysis, recommendations for ensuring good epidemiological practice and good practice data linkage.