HIMSS: Value emerging from secondary uses of EHR data

ORLANDO, FLA. -- “Much to my amazement, standards and interoperability [for health IT] have occurred,” said Christopher G. Chute, MD, DrPH, of Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., during an educational session Feb. 20 at the Physicians IT Symposium at HIMSS.

In his presentation, “Innovative Uses of Electronic Data: Driving Value out of the EHR,” Chute said standardization plays a role in pushing clinical research forward and there is value to be gained from an electronic record’s secondary uses.

Biomedical research is evolving to a more collaborative pursuit, Chute said, but common semantics, common information models and a common language of science must be put in place. A common language of science doesn't look for a common word across languages; rather it seeks commonality using abstract concepts. For example, prostate cancer is rendered.as SNOMED CID 399068003.

“Comparable and consistent clinical information requires standards,” Chute said, and data interoperability will be the key for this innovation.

Mayo Clinic is currently engaged with 14 academic and industry partners including University of Pittsburgh to develop tools and resources that influence and extend secondary uses of clinical data. With specific initiatives of high throughput phenotyping, pipeline tooling and natural language processing, Mayo Clinic is seeking to drive innovation in the themes of data normalization, phenotype recognition and data quality and evaluation frameworks.

Its vision is a federated informatics research community using open-source resources to help address barriers to the use of EHR data for secondary purposes, Chute noted.

“The boundary between clinical research and clinical research standards is really eroding,” said Chute. Science and clinical disciplines have the same needs and requirements for comparable data, and the recognition across the communities is “we’re not going to do this twice,” he added

“There’s a merging and remarkable synergy across these communities.”

According to Chute, information standards, especially vocabularies, are the foundation for scientific synergies.  “We need comparable and consistent information and we need to be able to access that [information] across databases” so that clinicians can work in real time out of the databases hospitals are reporting into instead of going through various mapping and translation routes.

Chute also noted that some years ago, there were more health standards organizations “than you could shake a stick at” but in recent years, consolidation and coordination has emerged across the health standards community.

Innovative uses of EMR data are imminent, Chute concluded. “I actually believe that the value of the electronic record has started to shift so that the value of the aggregation or society or medicine or humanity is actually greater than the individual components are for the patient; that we are now entering an era where the information we can learn from secondary use across aggregated patient records…afford an opportunity to actually, from a research context, understand whether we are helping or hurting at a larger scale without necessarily compromising privacy or confidentiality.”