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Health IT: Think Research

Still Thinking Research
Strategies to Advance the Use of Electronic Health Records to Bridge Patient Care and Research

The potential to gather data on thousands—even millions—of patient encounters provides an unprecedented opportunity to make the connection between research and healthcare delivery.

A follow-up to our 2005 analysis, this report examines the extent to which agencies, organizations, and health care stakeholders are using digital patient data in research today. We found some grounds for optimism—this area is more active than it was in 2005, and federal legislation and programs are major catalysts for action. At the same time, we found that the health IT infrastructure is still falling short of its potential to increase understanding of disease progression and advance biomedical innovation.

This report presents four recommendations for action that, if implemented appropriately, provide us with opportunities to harness health IT for learning and research purposes.  

Media: “Patient advocates believe that making use of digitized data should be a higher priority in medicine. "There's just an incredibly wide range of possibilities for research from using all this aggregated data…We're asking, 'Why aren't we paying a little bit more attention to that?'"
- Margaret Anderson, executive director of FasterCures, in an article in the MIT Technology Review on the value of electronic health data for research

"Think Research: Using Electronic Health Records to Bridge Patient Care and Research"

When health IT emerged as a national priority more than five years ago, FasterCures was the first to call for combining clinical data with research goals, with the release of our 2005 report, Think Research. In this report, we urge institutions to "think research" as they struggle with the adoption and implementation of EHR systems. While the focus of most efforts to do so has been on improving care by limiting costs and medical errors, the real savings, in terms of both reducing healthcare costs and, more importantly, in eliminating human suffering, will come from curing disease and from limiting its damage.The report examines the current landscape of EHR adoption and profiles innovative health systems that are pioneering the use of EHRs as a research tool.