van den Heuvel, J. M.
Hövels, A. M.
Büller, H. R.
Mantel-Teeuwisse, A. K.
de Boer, A.
Maitland-van der Zee, A. H.
Article History
Received: 25 August 2017
Accepted: 21 December 2017
First Online: 18 April 2018
Ethics approval and consent to participate
: For this study, data from the NControl database were obtained. Our dataset contains data of 544 pharmacies, spread across The Netherlands. Since 2011, the NControl database contains data related to over 557 million prescriptions and 7.2 million patients.Patients in the database cannot be identified, but can be tracked over time across pharmacies in the NControl database. Prescribers are anonymized and cannot be identified nor tracked over time. NControl is allowed to use these prescription data for research purposes. NControl adheres to data protection and privacy regulations, as established in amongst others the Personal Data Protection Act in The Netherlands as well as the NEN 7510 standard, related to information protection in healthcare, which is derived from ISO 27001 and 27,002.
: See above
: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
: Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.