Wall Street Journal Examines Use Of Electronic Health Records To Pull Data For Research

Main Category: IT / Internet / E-mail
Article Date: 28 Jan 2006 - 0:00 PDT

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The Wall Street Journal on Wednesday examined the "growing national effort" to comb through electronic health records to gain data for research, safety assurance and best-practice identification. The Journal profiled two intensive-care databases used for pediatrics. One database, run by Pediatrix Medical in Florida, uses a system that monitors newborns' vital signs to feed statistics into a "massive electronic documentation system," the Journal reports. The information has been used to test the effectiveness of antibiotics -- at the request of NIH and FDA -- and is beneficial in providing evidence of best practices. A Burlington, Vt.-based not-for profit, Vermont-Oxford Network, has a similar system that is used to determine if quality improvement training and performance feedback increase the use of lifesaving therapy in intensive care units. In the future, the system will send out alerts for best-practice guidelines to hospitals and physicians. However, privacy advocates are concerned that "data mining" will enable insurers and employers to obtain personal information about people's medical history that can be used against them. Technology currently is being developed to "strip all identifying data" from the records to combat that concern, the Journal reports. Carolyn Clancy, director for the Agency for Healthcare and Research and Quality, said, "As more data comes to exist in digital form, it will increasingly be available to researchers in electronic formats that can be used to quickly measure health outcomes." AHRQ is currently sponsoring the use of "de-identified" data to study the benefits and risks of medications for diseases such as arthritis and cancer (Landro, Wall Street Journal, 1/25).

"Reprinted with permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation . © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.

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