Zorgdeclaraties, een waardevolle bron van informatie

Scientific evidence for the effect of non-drug treatments for Parkinson’s disease is increasing. Because even well-controlled clinical studies have certain methodological limitations, it is sometimes difficult to translate the findings from scientific research into everyday clinical practice. In this article, we look at another source of information about healthcare in daily practice, namely insurance data. We show that analysis of insurance data can be an important addition to scientific evidence from controlled clinical trials. We illustrate this by means of a recent publication in which this method is used to investigate whether specialised physiotherapy has additional value when compared to regular physiotherapy for the treatment of people with Parkinson’s disease.

Conflict of interest and financial support: potential conflicts of interest have been reported for this article. ICMJE forms provided by the authors are available online along with the full text of this article.