Physics of the medical record: Handling time in health record studies

Abstract

The rapid increase in adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) creates the possibility of tracking billions of patient visits per year and exploiting them for clinical research. The international observational research collaboration, Observational Health Data Sciences and Informatics (OHDSI), has counted 682 million patient records that have been converted to a common format known at the OMOP Common Data Model [1]. While this number includes duplicates and records that have not been made broadly available to researchers, its scale demonstrates that converting the world population to a common format is feasible.