electronic health records

To ease data collection for clinical research and ongoing analysis of clinical processes, teams at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) are working to bridge the gap between clinical systems and research systems.

Unauthorized use of Vanderbilt University Medical Center's (VUMC) clinical databases — Epic, Medipac or Star Panel — to check on the health status of fellow employees or to peer into the medical records of other individuals not under someone’s care, can result in progressive discipline or even termination.

To most effectively use electronic health records for research, investigators should query multiple components of the record to identify patients with specific diseases.

People who study health care delivery tend to be interested in the ins and outs of patient information — how it’s gathered, how it’s used. One important focus is provider-to-provider communication associated with patient transitions between care settings.

With research and development costs for many drugs reaching well into the billions, pharmaceutical companies want more than ever to determine whether their drugs already at market have any hidden therapeutic benefits that could warrant putting additional indications on the label and increasing production.

In recent years the federal government has used financial incentives and penalties to promote use of electronic health records (EHR), but in these regulations the issue of EHR data interoperability — that is, data standardization — has been left largely unresolved, dimming prospects for data exchange, population health surveillance and systematic improvement across health networks.

A tool developed for one institution’s electronic health records can work at other institutions, potentially facilitating the use of these records in research studies.