Every Day I Write the Book: Transforming EHR Data from Daily Practice into New Knowledge

Despite producing mountains of data in the daily course of care, the documentation labors of frontline clinicians currently return very little value to them or to the health system. The potential of these painstakingly collected data are enormous and clinical registries can extract the extraordinary capacity of these data and transform them into research-ready datasets while protecting the confidentiality of the patients and clinicians. Clinical registries represent transformative tools for primary care research, bringing together the dimensions of clinical practice, research, quality improvement, and policy impact from a large, nationally reflective, diverse sample of practices and patients. The PRIME Registry is one such clinical registry that extracts electronic health record data from more than 600 primary care practices across the United States that is helping advance research, improve quality, and shape the policies required to achieve high-performing primary care for all. Other examples of primary care registries exist, but most of the painstakingly captured data from frontline care remains fallow. Enabling use of these data are important for research, to prevent harm from mis-trained machine learning algorithms, and for monitoring the health of the public.