Abstract
With the explosion of availability and use of electronic healthcare data, significant efforts are underway to prepare these data for use in conducting comparative effectiveness research (CER). This chapter provides a brief history of the motivation for this transformation and describes the most commonly used traditional and newer sources of these data. Traditional sources include administrative claims data and registry data. Newer sources include data from electronic health records (EHRs), health information exchanges (HIEs), and social media sites. Examples are provided throughout. In the spirit of the learning healthcare system, the focus is on making secondary use of clinical data for research purposes, that is, data from EHRs. The challenging issues of data quality, certification and standardization, interoperability, linking and integrating data sources, and ethics, legality, and privacy are discussed. The chapter ends with an example of how these same data can be transformed from research back into clinical practice to improve care and, thus, to further the learning healthcare system.
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Devine, B. (2016). Sources of Data for Comparative Effectiveness Research. In: Levy, A., Sobolev, B. (eds) Comparative Effectiveness Research in Health Services. Health Services Research. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7600-0_13
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