Enhancing electronic health records to support clinical research

The "Learning Health System" has been described as an environment that drives research and innovation as a natural outgrowth of patient care. Electronic health records (EHRs) are necessary to enable the Learning Health System; however, a source of frustration is that current systems fail to adequately support research needs. We propose a model for enhancing EHRs to collect structured and standards-based clinical research data during clinical encounters that promotes efficiency and computational reuse of quality data for both care and research. The model integrates Common Data Elements (CDEs) for clinical research into existing clinical documentation workflows, leveraging executable documentation guidance within the EHR to support coordinated, standardized data collection for both patient care and clinical research.