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September 2013

Dear NTUSP alums:

 As you may know, Taiwan has started universal health insurance for sixteen years with accumulated data on 23 million people. Now, we set up a research center to work on this huge database. We believe that this database may be a gold mine for pharma or biotech companies. We all know that  that NTUSPAA-NA always play an important role in help NTU and NTUSP. The members of NTUSPAA-NA are our outstanding alumni and many of you worked in big pharma or biotech companies at high level positions. Therefore, on behalf of NTU Health Data Research Center (HDRC),  I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the service offered by the center in order to have international collaborations in the near future.

Founded in November 2012, NTU's HDRC aims to promote health data research by cooperating with Collaboration Center of Health Information Application(CCHIA) of Ministry of Health and Welfare, which offers more than 30 related databases for users to apply, including the whole population-based claimed data from National Health Insurance, combined cancer and death reason registry.  Our center is given permission to access to all these databases.

You may know that more than 99% Taiwan people (more than 20 millions) are covered in the National Health Insurance Program since 1995. This is a valuable longitudinal database in Asia. Many research papers of pharmacoepidemiology, pharmacoeconomics, etc., have been successfully published by using these databases as study materials. In addition, our research teams from Colleges of Medicine, Pharmacy, and Business Administration, etc. are funded over a million USD to develop various projects which would be applied in drug discovery and development (disease burden, outcomes of treatment,…), post-marketing surveillance, and prediction of new drug consumption, comparative outcome research, etc. These longitudinal databases can help important decisions in health businesses.  For the details regarding the center and data scope, please refer to the following sites:

NTUHDRC   http://ntuhdrc.blog.ntu.edu.tw
CCHIA    http://biostat.cmu.edu.tw/~nhip/indexn.html

As the Vice President of NTU and the Director of this center, I would like to ask for your help to share this important message with your colleagues, possible stakeholders or the parties concerned in States. We would like to generate more collaborative research projects with pharmaceutical companies. Let me know if you have further questions. I am also copy this email to our Project Manager, Celia Yang. If there are enough interests in these databases, we could fly to US to have a brief introduction to you.

Look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,

Professor Ming-Je Tang

Vice President, National Taiwan University