title: The future of medical diagnostics: large digitized databases.
abstract: The electronic health record mandate within the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will have a far-reaching affect on medicine. In this article, we provide an in-depth analysis of how this mandate is expected to stimulate the production of large-scale, digitized databases of patient information. There is evidence to suggest that millions of patients and the National Institutes of Health will fully support the mining of such databases to better understand the process of diagnosing patients. This data mining likely will reaffirm and quantify known risk factors for many diagnoses. This quantification may be leveraged to further develop computer-aided diagnostic tools that weigh risk factors and provide decision support for health care providers. We expect that creation of these databases will stimulate the development of computer-aided diagnostic support tools that will become an integral part of modern medicine.
authors.affiliation: Department of Biomathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA. wesley1610@gmail.com
authors.forename: Wesley T
authors.initials: WT
authors.lastname: Kerr
authors.forename: Edward P
authors.initials: EP
authors.lastname: Lau
authors.forename: Gwen E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Owens
authors.forename: Aaron
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Trefler
mesh_terms: D057171:American Recovery and Reinvestment Act; D019295:Computational Biology / Q000379:methods; D057225:Data Mining; D003628:Database Management Systems; D016208:Databases, Factual; D020000:Decision Support Systems, Clinical; D003661:Decision Support Techniques; D003936:Diagnosis, Computer-Assisted / Q000379:methods / Q000639:trends*; D019937:Diagnostic Techniques and Procedures / Q000639:trends*; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000458:organization & administration; D006801:Humans; D037141:Mandatory Programs / Q000458:organization & administration; D009316:National Institutes of Health (U.S.) / Q000458:organization & administration; D012307:Risk Factors; D014481:United States