Informatics grand challenges in multi-institutional comparative effectiveness research

摘要

Comparative effectiveness research (CER) has the potential to radically transform the healthcare delivery system by identifying those therapies, procedures, preventive tests, and healthcare processes and devices that are most effective from the standpoints of cost, quality and safety. The widespread adoption and conduct of CER will place enormous and growing demands on the existing clinical informatics research infrastructure [1]. Many attempts have been made to use existing, large-scale healthcare claims data for CER, with varying levels of success. In an attempt to improve the accuracy of these studies, and with increasing availability of data generated by electronic health records (EHRs), researchers are beginning to explore the use of large databases of clinical information derived from EHRs.