Tuesday, December 18, 2012

Mining electronic health records: towards better research applications and clinical care

Nature Reviews Genetics 13, 395-405 (June 2012) | doi:10.1038/nrg3208
Peter B. Jensen1, Lars J. Jensen1 & Søren Brunak1,2
  
http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v13/n6/full/nrg3208.html

http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v14/n1/full/nrg3208-c1.html?WT.ec_id=NRG-201301

Clinical data describing the phenotypes and treatment of patients represents an underused data source that has much greater research potential than is currently realized. Mining of electronic health records (EHRs) has the potential for establishing new patient-stratification principles and for revealing unknown disease correlations. Integrating EHR data with genetic data will also give a finer understanding of genotype–phenotype relationships. However, a broad range of ethical, legal and technical reasons currently hinder the systematic deposition of these data in EHRs and their mining. Here, we consider the potential for furthering medical research and clinical care using EHR data and the challenges that must be overcome before this is a reality.

http://www.patientslikeme.com/

A recent survey by HIMSS Analytics Europe identified 'funding' as the key barrier to progress in the EHR area, and other factors such as 'staff habits' were also high on the list in many countries.

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