The notion of epidemiology, although highly appraised and valuable in the context of public health, is sometimes considered rather inefficient in terms of clinical practice. Indeed, according to the researchers, epidemiological studies are primarily focused on collecting descriptive data on the dissemination of a certain disease or condition while providing no practical value to the clinicians who are to implement relevant changes to health care (Neta et al., 2018). For this reason, the application of epidemiology to the general practice currently requires a series of interventions in terms of data productivity.
Undeniably, there are specific emergence cases when epidemiological data is processed along with the intervention itself. The current COVID-19 pandemic provides an explicit example of how promptly gathered data may benefit the process of treatment. Thus, when at the very beginning of the pandemic, the epidemiologists estimated the risk groups that might struggle with COVID-19 complications, clinicians and medical administrations promptly reorganized the environment in order to minimize the risk (Oremus et al., 2018). However, the primary issue remains unchanged and tackles a need for implementation science to become more correlated to the descriptive epidemiological data.
Implementation study is a methodological branch that analyzed how collected evidence may be efficiently transformed into a regularly used framework (Neta et al., 2018). When it comes to the ways of making epidemiology more efficient, it is imperative to understand that data gathered for descriptive research may become redundant what analyzed in the clinical context. For this reason, the clinicians should only pay attention to such data as an explicit correlation between an independent variable such as smoking or age and dependent variables that derive specifically for a disease case (Hannaford & Owen-Smith, 1998). Thus, it may be concluded that epidemiological data, while extremely important for the overall development of health care, is incapable of accelerating a rapid change.
References
Hannaford, P. C., & Owen-Smith, V. (1998). Using epidemiological data to guide clinical practice: Review of studies on cardiovascular disease and use of combined oral contraceptives. BMJ, 316(7136), 984–987. Web.
Neta, G., Brownson, R. C., & Chambers, D. A. (2018). Opportunities for epidemiologists in implementation science: A primer. American Journal of Epidemiology, 187(5), 899–910. Web.
Oremus, M., Taylor-Wilson, R., Aldrich, M., Bell, K., Gaudino, J., Palevsky, S., Payne, J., Raynes-Greenow, C., Sim, F., Smith, M., Weiss, S., & Zhang, Y. (2021). The role of epidemiologists in SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 research. Public Health, 190. Web.