title: Enhancing electronic health records to support clinical research.
abstract: The "Learning Health System" has been described as an environment that drives research and innovation as a natural outgrowth of patient care. Electronic health records (EHRs) are necessary to enable the Learning Health System; however, a source of frustration is that current systems fail to adequately support research needs. We propose a model for enhancing EHRs to collect structured and standards-based clinical research data during clinical encounters that promotes efficiency and computational reuse of quality data for both care and research. The model integrates Common Data Elements (CDEs) for clinical research into existing clinical documentation workflows, leveraging executable documentation guidance within the EHR to support coordinated, standardized data collection for both patient care and clinical research.
authors.affiliation: Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics, New York, NY.
authors.forename: David K
authors.initials: DK
authors.lastname: Vawdrey
authors.affiliation: Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics, New York, NY.
authors.forename: Chunhua
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weng
authors.affiliation: Department of Clinical Research Informatics, NIH Clinical Center, Bethesda, MD.
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Herion
authors.affiliation: Laboratory for Informatics Development, NIH Clinical Center, Bethesda, MD ; Columbia University Department of Biomedical Informatics, New York, NY.
authors.forename: James J
authors.initials: JJ
authors.lastname: Cimino