VigiGrade: A tool to identify well-documented individual case reports and highlight systematic data quality issues

Abstract

Background: Individual case safety reports of suspected harm from medicines are fundamental to post-marketing surveillance. Their value is directly proportional to the amount of clinically relevant information they include. To improve the quality of the data, communication between stakeholders is essential and can be facilitated by a simple score and visualisation of the results. Objective: The objective of this study was to propose a measure of completeness and identify predictors of welldocumented reports, globally. Methods: The Uppsala Monitoring Centre has developed the vigiGrade completeness score to measure the amount of clinically relevant information in structured format, without reflecting whether the information establishes causality between the drug and adverse event. The vigiGrade completeness score (C) starts at 1 for reports with information on time-to-onset, age, sex, indication, outcome, report type, dose, country, primary reporter and comments. For each missing dimension, a penalty is detracted which varies with clinical relevance. We classified reports with C > 0.8 as © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.