Health data research on diabetes, cardiovascular disease and medication safety

Norlowe Research analyzes publicly available health data, including federal datasets and clinical trial registries. Each analysis follows a plan written before the work begins and runs on code that reproduces every result from the original files.

See the focus areas
Clusters of city lights at night, seen from orbit.
Baltimore (top) and Washington, D.C., at night, photographed from the International Space Station in December 2010. Image: NASA.

Focus areas

The three areas overlap. Diabetes raises the risk of heart disease, and many patients take several medicines for both conditions, so data collected about one often bear on the others.

  • Insulin crystals seen through a microscope.

    Diabetes

    How diabetes shows up in national health surveys, spending records and county estimates, and the care that people with the condition receive.

  • Human blood cells seen through a scanning electron microscope.

    Cardiovascular disease

    Heart disease as recorded in hospital outcome measures, clinical trial registries and the published medical literature.

  • Tablets and capsules of several kinds.

    Medication safety

    What comes to light about a medicine after it reaches the market, traced through adverse event reports, drug labels and prescription records.

A blue punched card with rows of printed digits and punched holes.
A punched card of the kind once used to tabulate census and survey data. Image: Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

How the work is done

Each analysis begins with a written plan that sets the population, the definitions and the comparisons before any results are seen. Changes made later are dated and explained.

All of the work, from the original data files to the final tables, is done in code. Where data publishers report their own figures, results are checked against them, and each written result says what the data cannot show.

Read about the approach

About Norlowe Research

Norlowe Research LLC is based in Riverdale, Maryland, in Prince George’s County, a few miles from Washington, D.C. For each result it reports, the company keeps a record of how the result was reached, from the data release to the final table.

More about the company