What Is Pharmacoepidemiology and How Does It Inform Clinical Care?

Pharmacoepidemiology (PE) is a hybrid of epidemiology and pharmacy that studies the patterns and associated benefits and risks of medicines used in a given population. This discipline evolved from the lack of clinically relevant information derived from small and unrepresentative human samples in clinical trials (usually randomized control trials), meaning that once a medicine reaches the market for use in a more diverse population, little is known about the efficacy and safety in the “real‐world.”