How Researchers Are Using Electronic Health Records to Improve Care and Outcomes

I’m pleased to tell you about a new audio report by iHealthBeat on the promise and challenges of using electronic health records (EHRs) for research. I was happy to participate in the discussion, along with several other experts—Elizabeth McGlynn, PhD, director of the Kaiser Permanente Center for Effectiveness and Safety Research; Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, assistant professor of biomedical informatics research at Stanford School of Medicine, and Susan Weber, PhD, director of informatics services at the Stanford Center for Clinical Informatics.

I noted that EHRs can be a rich source of clinical information that can help answer the questions most important to patients. The report highlights PCORI’s work to develop PCORnet, a national resource to harness the power or partnerships and health data to compare how treatments work in the real world.

In the report, McGlynn, who leads one of PCORnet’s Clinical Data Research Networks, points out the challenge of working with patient information originally entered in many different ways. She describes how patient records can be translated into a common data model, which she likens to a decoder ring.

Shah describes a recent study that used a novel data mining technique to comb through millions of EHRs, including clinical documents, admission and discharge notes, and other unstructured data. Weber, meanwhile, talks about patient privacy and security issues.

I hope you’ll take a few moments to listen to the report from iHealthBeat, which is a daily news service from the California HealthCare Foundation.