Details on the medical care of hundreds of millions of patients are piling up in electronic health records in clinics and hospitals around the world, comprising a growing treasure trove of real-world data on the daily practice of medicine—patient diagnoses, treatments and outcomes. Hardly anyone has sought to tap the knowledge sequestered in those digital vaults that might benefit future patient care. Until now.
Aided by advances in artificial intelligence, search capabilities and other analytics, researchers are now probing the huge databases for rapid insights into the performance of the healthcare system.
For example, closely held Epic Systems Corp., maker of one of the most widely used electronic health record systems, searched a segment of its database in the spring of 2020 to find that routine breast, colon and cervical cancer screenings in the U.S. had each dropped by more than 85% during the first weeks of the Covid-19 pandemic. The report helped spur efforts to persuade people to make up for missed screenings.
WSJ (sub required)
Here is a cancer specific database from ASCO
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