In an example of how EHR data could transform clinical research, Cerner Corp. is partnering with the Duke Clinical Research institute to evaluate the use and potential impact of proven therapies for chronic cardiovascular disease. The two organizations aim to deliver clinicians insights on chronic cardiovascular disease, which if not treated properly can lead to heart disease and stroke.
The health IT vendor has created the Cerner Learning Health Network to help clinicians more easily and efficiently gain health insights and guide care. Cerner aims to automate data collection from multiple sources, including the EHR, to rapidly give medical researchers access to important information that has the potential to transform patient care.
The pilot project and study, named the Learning Registry by the DCRI, will use Cerner technology to analyze de-identified patient data from the University of Missouri Health Care and Ascension Seton in partnership with Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin, with the goal of finding the most effective treatment options.
After the pilot project and study are complete, Cerner said clients would be able to leverage HealtheDataLab with the Cerner Learning Health Network to aggregate de-identified patient data from both Cerner and non-Cerner EHRs. Researchers can transform the data sets into research-ready formats and build complex models and algorithms to give providers more information to make more informed care decisions, the company said. By using predictive modeling and intelligence, the platform supports early identification of individuals who may be at risk for costly episodes of care and can help pinpoint the most effective and cost-efficient treatment options.
“Current models for clinical research and registries that rely on mostly manual chart abstraction are too expensive, too slow and too small to continue. We have to figure out better ways to leverage existing electronic resources to transform how we do clinical research,” said Ann Marie Navar, M.D., Ph.D., principal investigator and cardiovascular prevention researcher at DCRI, in a statement. “The EHR is an obvious starting point and HealtheIntent has all the right ingredients. It incorporates data from multiple EHRs, can link to national mortality and claims databases and helps us to harness the power and information security of cloud computing.”
The DCRI said it would publish the research results from the pilot project in a study sponsored by Janssen Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a pharmaceutical company of Johnson & Johnson, with several products used to treat and prevent cardiovascular disease.
