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

Peter B Jensen, Lars J Jensen, Søren Brunak

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

1148 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

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.
Original languageEnglish
JournalNature Reviews. Genetics
Volume13
Issue number6
Pages (from-to)395-405
Number of pages11
ISSN1471-0056
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2012

Keywords

  • Biomedical Research
  • Electronic Health Records
  • Genetic Association Studies
  • Humans
  • Information Dissemination
  • Medical Records Systems, Computerized
  • Patient Care
  • Primary Health Care
  • Public Health

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