A New Generation of Methodologies for Health Services and Policy Research in the Use Of Health Information Technologies

• Activity Number: 553
• Type: Roundtables
• Date/Time: Wednesday, August 7, 2013 : 12:30 PM to 1:50 PM
• Sponsor: Health Policy Statistics Section
• Author(s): Laurel Taylor*+
• Companies: Assistant Director of the Institute of Health Services and Policy Research

Abstract

Gradually, health care systems are making massive transformations to incorporate digitized systems to capture point-of-care information on labs, drugs, diagnostic images, clinical notes, and patient-oriented outcomes. These rich massive data sets reflect longitudinal experiences of individuals in the population and provide new opportunities for research and innovation in population surveillance, personalized care based on individual trajectories, and responses to treatment. They also create fascinating and interesting challenges to develop statistical methods for both observational and large-scale pragmatic randomized trials that can be conducted within large electronic health care databases. There is no doubt that the opportunities to pioneer new methodologies and create an unbelievable generation of new knowledge to provide personalized care will depend on strong collaboration between clinicians, epidemiologists, statisticians, and computer scientists to create a new generation of tools that will enable this data to be effectively used to improve our knowledge and apply this within the health care context. In this presentation, examples of these emerging areas will be provided.