Validation of Birth and Birth Outcome Information in the German Pharmacoepidemiological Research Database (GePaRD)

Background: Any use of data not primarily collected for research purposes requires their prior validation. A large pharmacoepidemiological database was created in Germany, which contains records of ˜14 mill insurants from four statutory health insurances covering whole Germany (17% of the German population). The aim of the current analysis was to validate the birth and birth outcome information in GePaRD by comparing it to official statistics. Methods: We estimated the crude birth rate (number of newborns per 100,000 population), the fertility rate (number of newborns per 1,000 women in reproductive age range (1…