title: Straight talk with...Harlan Krumholz.
abstract: Many big-name pharmaceutical companies have made strides toward data transparency in recent years, but perhaps none is as open as Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is now. On 29 January, the New Jersey-based drug giant announced that it will make all of its clinical trial data available through an academic clearinghouse for scientific information known as the Yale University Open Data Access (YODA) project. Under the agreement-the most comprehensive industry-academic partnership of its kind-YODA will independently review and make decisions about requests to access de-identified, patient-level data from the clinical studies supporting all of J&J's approved drugs.It's a major step forward for YODA, which was born in 2011 out of an initial project with the global drug and device manufacturer Medtronic, which is headquartered in Minneapolis, to release data from studies of the company's Infuse product, which contains recombinant human bone morphogenetic protein-2, used to promote bone formation. At the helm of YODA is Harlan Krumholz, a physician-scientist who for almost two decades has led the Yale-New Haven Hospital Center for Outcomes Research and Evaluation, which aims to help compare the effectiveness of various healthcare interventions and, ultimately, improve clinical decision-making. Krumholz spoke with Roxanne Khamsi about how greater access to data is a boon for medicine.
authors.forename: Harlan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Krumholz
authors.forename: Roxanne
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Khamsi
mesh_terms: D022126:Access to Information; D003237:Connecticut; D004345:Drug Industry / Q000639:trends; D006801:Humans; D033181:Information Dissemination; D017063:Outcome Assessment, Health Care; D014495:Universities