Real-world evidence (RWE) is the collection of data related to the health of research subjects or aggregated data derived from these data in a real-world setting and through analysis to obtain clinical evidence of drug use and potential benefit-risk research processes. With the current transformation of the health field to a "patient-centered" direction, making full use of real-world research can make up for the insufficiency of clinical randomized controlled trials, promote the development of personalized medicine and smart medicine, and improve the service and quality of medical and health care.

Due to the high heterogeneity of medical big data and the fact that a large amount of medical data is unstructured, efficient integration and in-depth mining of information in medical and health fields have become the keys to promoting the research value of real-world data. With the widespread popularity of data science in various fields and the major breakthroughs of artificial intelligence in natural language processing and image recognition, in the past decade, many start-up medical technology companies and established information technology/ pharmaceutical companies have gradually adopted artificial intelligence and big data analysis. Dealing with mining real-world data is a new direction for its development. In addition, due to the particularity of real-world research on how to protect health data safely, enterprises and the relevant national legal protection system have also become the focus of social concern at home and abroad. Therefore, Harvard Chan Chinese Student Health Club launched the sixth lecture of this Medical Road Pilot forum series, aiming to discuss the opportunities and challenges of China's real-world data application in depth from the perspectives of technological change, development strategy, market structure, cooperation mechanism, etc.