Jeanne Madden Lead Author in Study of Electronic Health Records
In the first known study to examine the completeness of clinical data in a large electronic health record (EHR), researchers from Harvard Medical School’s Department of Population Medicine at the Harvard Pilgrim Health Care Institute found substantial missing data, with profound implications for clinical care, medical research, and public health. The study is published on-line in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association and was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Electronic health records are used by more than 83% of office-based physicians in the U.S. Lead author Jeanne Madden, PhD, Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmacy and Health Systems Sciences in Northeastern University’s School of Pharmacy, noted, “This is a serious nationwide problem with significant repercussions for both clinical management and population research. With medical decision-making becoming increasingly computerized, care will suffer if there is overreliance on data that are incomplete,” she said. ”Health research will undercount important diagnosed patient populations and their use of services.” Dr. Madden’s research primarily concerns access to health care, the burden of costs on patients, and the consequences of health system changes. She has directed several federally-funded studies examining the impact of changes in pharmacy benefits on access to treatments for chronic illness. (Solomon McCown on behalf of Atrius Health Dawn Bergantino, April 14, 2016 [Press release], [email protected]).