Summary
Objectives: Implementation of Electronic Health Record (EHR) systems continues to expand. The
massive number of patient encounters results in high amounts of stored data. Transforming
clinical data into knowledge to improve patient care has been the goal of biomedical
informatics professionals for many decades, and this work is now increasingly recognized
outside our field. In reviewing the literature for the past three years, we focus
on “big data” in the context of EHR systems and we report on some examples of how
secondary use of data has been put into practice.
Methods: We searched PubMed database for articles from January 1, 2011 to November 1, 2013.
We initiated the search with keywords related to “big data” and EHR. We identified
relevant articles and additional keywords from the retrieved articles were added.
Based on the new keywords, more articles were retrieved and we manually narrowed down
the set utilizing predefined inclusion and exclusion criteria.
Results: Our final review includes articles categorized into the themes of data mining (pharmacovigilance,
phenotyping, natural language processing), data application and integration (clinical
decision support, personal monitoring, social media), and privacy and security.
Conclusion: The increasing adoption of EHR systems worldwide makes it possible to capture large
amounts of clinical data. There is an increasing number of articles addressing the
theme of “big data”, and the concepts associated with these articles vary. The next
step is to transform healthcare big data into actionable knowledge.
Keywords
Electronic health records - data mining - natural language processing - privacy -
security - quality improvement