The increased adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) in the United States provides new opportunities for using these data to support clinical research. EHRs are digital versions of the paper charts in clinicians’ offices, containing detailed information on patients’ health histories.
Clinical researchers can use de-identified EHR data for many different types of studies, such as those that aim to improve our understanding of disease mechanisms, identify risk factors for disease, or develop and test new treatments.
In addition, because EHR data contain information on large numbers of patients from diverse backgrounds, they can be used to study rare diseases or compare the effectiveness of treatments in different subgroups of patients.
How EHR Data Can Be Used in Clinical Research
There are many ways that researchers can use electronic health records for clinical research. For example, researchers can use EHR data to:
- Identify individuals with a specific condition or disease of interest
- Characterize the natural history of a disease
- Explore risk factors for developing a disease
- Study how often a particular treatment is used in clinical practice
- Compare the effectiveness of different treatments
- Examine disparities in access to care or outcomes among different patient populations.
In some cases, researchers may want to combine electronic health records for clinical research with other types of data, such as data from laboratory tests or imaging studies, to create more comprehensive patient profiles. This process is called “data integration.”
Data integration can be used to support many different types of studies, including those that aim to find new biomarkers for disease or predict which patients are most likely to respond to a particular treatment.
