Challenges in the design and analysis of sequentially monitored postmarket safety surveillance evaluations using electronic observational health care data
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: Many challenges arise when conducting a sequentially monitored medical product safety surveillance evaluation using observational electronic data captured during routine care. We review existing sequential approaches for potential use in this setting, including a continuous sequential testing method that has been utilized within the Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD) and group sequential methods, which are used widely in randomized clinical trials. METHODS: Using both simulated data and preliminary data from an ongoing VSD evaluation, we discuss key sequential design considerations, including sample size and duration of surveillance, shape of the signaling threshold, and frequency of interim testing. RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS: All designs control the overall Type 1 error rate across all tests performed, but each yields different tradeoffs between the probability and timing of true and false positive signals. Designs tailored to monitor efficacy outcomes in clinical trials have been well studied, but less consideration has been given to optimizing design choices for observational safety settings, where the hypotheses, population, prevalence and severity of the outcomes, implications of signaling, and costs of false positive and negative findings are very different. Analytic challenges include confounding, missing and partially accrued data, high misclassification rates for outcomes presumptively defined using diagnostic codes, and unpredictable changes in dynamically accessed data over time (e.g., differential product uptake). Many of these factors influence the variability of the adverse events under evaluation and, in turn, the probability of committing a Type 1 error. Thus, to ensure proper Type 1 error control, planned sequential thresholds should be adjusted over time to account for these issues.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.066 | 0.045 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it