Digital Data Improvement Priorities for Continuous Learning in Health and Health Care - Workshop Summary - available free from the Institute of Medicine.
"Digital health data are the lifeblood of a continuous learning health system. A steady flow of reliable data is necessary to coordinate and monitor patient care, analyze and improve systems of care, conduct research to develop new products and approaches, assess the effectiveness of medical interventions, and advance population health. The totality of available health data is a crucial resource that should be considered an invaluable public asset in the pursuit of better care, improved health, and lower health care costs."
Dr. Rich Platt, Harvard Medical School's Department of Population Medicine and I co-presented on distributed data networks. Our themes included:
- Distributed data queries can provide the foundation of a learning health system.
- Advantages of distributed data networks include data accuracy, timeliness, flexibility, and sustainability.
- Distributed queries facilitate asking questions of large datasets in ways that are HIPAA-compliant and maintain local context.
