Real-World Evidence in Action: Insights from CPC+CBEx 2025
In this CPC+CBEx 2025 interview, experts Lalan Wilfong, MD, and Aimee Ginsburg Chesnick, PharmD, BCPS, explore how real-world evidence is shaping drug approvals, clinical decision-making, and future opportunities for stronger, more actionable data.
What emerging trends are you seeing in how real-world evidence is being used to inform both clinical practice and policy decisions today?
Lalan Wilfong, MD: Real-world evidence is being used in policy and coverage decisions today in many ways. One of the biggest areas is drugs that are being approved or accelerated approvals with very small patient volumes. But then we need to understand what the impact of those drugs is on larger patient samples.
Using real-world evidence to understand the efficacy and toxicities in a much larger setting is super important for us to find the value in these drugs.
Aimee Ginsburg Chesnick, PharmD, BCPS: The drugs are also getting additional approvals based on real-world evidence as it comes to the market.
Where do you think real-world evidence outperforms traditional clinical trial data, and where does it still fall short?
Ginsburg Chesnick: Real-world evidence helps give us the flavor of what happens in the real-world, as in the name. I think that clinical trials include a very specific population that is not necessarily who you see and treat on a daily basis. Adding real-world data and real-world evidence gives us the view into the general population and what you can expect from them.
Dr Wilfong: I completely agree, and I think the shortcoming of that is the data integrity. A lot of this stuff doesn't live in structured fields, so even with artificial intelligence (AI) where you can scrape that data from unstructured content, it becomes difficult to understand the validity of it because every physician and every patient may describe things a little bit differently. So you do lose some of that structured data that you would get in a clinical trial, where there are very defined algorithms of how you report things. That is one of the limitations.
The other is just the volume of data you need to make meaningful decisions. The smaller the sample sizes, the less variability there will be. You have to have large sample sizes to reduce that variability and have good, confident outcomes from what you're seeing. But then we live in an age still where people aren't sharing their data very well, and curating data from multiple sources provides even more complexity and challenges.
Ginsburg Chesnick: That's definitely an opportunity to pool data from different organizations to be able to have the complete picture of patients in different settings and have better evidence out of it.
For clinicians and decision-makers who may still be skeptical of real-world evidence, what key message are you hoping they walk away with after your session?
Dr Wilfong: The key message for clinicians and decision-makers using real-world evidence is how to interpret and utilize the evidence that's presented. You have to critically think about it, even more so than you do evidence that's published in peer-reviewed journals through clinical trials. You have to more critically think about what we just talked about: what the potential limitations of the data are, what you're seeing, is it actually meaningful, and does it apply to the work that you're doing.
Ginsburg Chesnick: Coming out of this session, what you will learn is there are specific options we will be giving for potential improvement in this data moving forward, so that it is stronger and more robust for the real-world evidence.
What have been your biggest takeaways from CPC+CBEx 2025?
Dr Wilfong: My biggest takeaway from the conference so far is that there's a potential for me to have a digital twin, which is super scary. No, there have been some really interesting discussions so far about the use of artificial intelligence in helping clinicians and patients do better with their health care.
It is amazing to me the advancements that have come along just in the past year and what the potential truly is. I think I'd limited that in my brain. Honestly, my mind was blown this morning about what that potential actually holds.
Ginsburg Chesnick: Definitely. To me, as a pharmacist, what's been most exciting and enlightening is to hear the evolution of pharmacist leadership, where they've been, where they're going, and how pharmacists can be involved in all points of care.
