A report released on Friday by a health care think tank urges the federal government to incorporate the needs of the medical research community when building a national health information network, Healthcare IT News reports.
The report from FasterCures/The Center for Accelerating Medical Solutions says giving researchers access to clinical data in personal and electronic medical records could advance the discovery of new disease treatments and help identify a broader group of potential clinical research participants.
The report recommends that the government include clinical research representatives in the process of developing standards for EMRs and an NHIN and that legislation, federal regulations and standards on EMRs include provisions to allow medical researchers to access the records. The report also says that health care IT vendors and organizations should work with clinical researchers to incorporate their needs into the architecture of EMRs and an NHIN, and groups that already have EMR databases should make them accessible to researchers, Healthcare IT News reports.
The report also says that EMR systems need to be interoperable in order to be useful to clinical researchers. Issues such as patients' consent to have their medical data used for research and HIPAA privacy regulations still need to be addressed (Broder, Healthcare IT News, 10/21).