[Terminology used in publications of pharmacoepidemiological research in france using health insurance reimbursement databases: need for harmonisation]

The reimbursement databases of the French health insurance systems are greatly used for pharmaceoepidemiological research. However, the terminology used to describe them in subsequent articles and abstracts vary greatly and thus lead to a problem of identification during bibliograhic research or during the process of indexation in medline. In this article we have fixed the terminology used and proposed both a terminology and appropriate MeSH terms for indexation for the futur. Fifty-six published studies were included. At least six different root terms were found to define the French health insurance system, 64.3% of the publications mentioned the term "database", and 30.4% mentioned the term "reimbursement". We propose that abstracts of future articles contain the three terms: database, reimbursement, and health insurance. We also propose to include in the keywords of an article the MeSH terms that are most appropriate to define these three concepts: Insurance, Health, Reimbursement and Databases, Factual.