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Use of electronic healthcare records in large‐scale simple randomized trials at the point of care for the documentation of value‐based medicine
Author(s) -
Staa T.P.,
Klungel O.,
Smeeth L.
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
journal of internal medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.625
H-Index - 160
eISSN - 1365-2796
pISSN - 0954-6820
DOI - 10.1111/joim.12211
Subject(s) - medicine , observational study , documentation , randomized controlled trial , electronic health record , scale (ratio) , medline , evidence based medicine , health records , health care , point of care , alternative medicine , clinical trial , confounding , family medicine , nursing , computer science , surgery , physics , pathology , quantum mechanics , political science , law , economics , programming language , economic growth
Abstract A solid foundation of evidence of the effects of an intervention is a prerequisite of evidence‐based medicine. The best source of such evidence is considered to be randomized trials, which are able to avoid confounding. However, they may not always estimate effectiveness in clinical practice. Databases that collate anonymized electronic health records ( EHR s) from different clinical centres have been widely used for many years in observational studies. Randomized point‐of‐care trials have been initiated recently to recruit and follow patients using the data from EHR databases. In this review, we describe how EHR databases can be used for conducting large‐scale simple trials and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of their use.