Altering the Function of the Electronic Medical Record: Creating a De-identified Database for Clinical Researchers...

The electronic medical record (EMR) can be an excellent data source for creating real case based discussion, patient simulations for high and low fidelity simulators, and datasets for retrospective studies and quality improvement trend analysis. Faculty can use cases based on real data, not contrived data in their classrooms. Faculty and doctoral students can perform retrospective studies exploring treatment modalities without being encumbered with the actual processes of collecting and storing data, and quality improvement specialists can look at trending data to improve outcomes. The big problem with using general EMR systems as they are out of the box is patient identifiers need to be scrubbed from the record so it can be used for these purposes. This paper discusses the uses of de-identified datasets and gives an example of how this has happened at one university.