Summary
Objectives: To summarize recent research and emerging trends in the area of secondary use of
healthcare data, and to present the best papers published in this field, selected
to appear in the 2017 edition of the IMIA Yearbook.
Methods: A literature review of articles published in 2016 and related to secondary use of
healthcare data was performed using two bibliographic databases. From this search,
941 papers were identified. The section editors independently reviewed the papers
for relevancy and impact, resulting in a consensus list of 14 candidate best papers.
External reviewers examined each of the candidate best papers and the final selection
was made by the editorial board of the Yearbook.
Results: From the 941 retrieved papers, the selection process resulted in four best papers.
These papers discuss data quality concerns, issues in preserving privacy of patients
in shared datasets, and methods of decision support when consuming large amounts of
raw electronic health record (EHR) data.
Conclusion: In 2016, a significant effort was put into the development of new systems which aim
to avoid significant human understanding and pre-processing of healthcare data, though
this is still only an emerging area of research. The value of temporal relationships
between data received significant study, as did effective information sharing while
preserving patient privacy.
Keywords
Data reuse - secondary use - big data in medicine
