Pennington Biomedical researchers assemble comprehensive history of electronic health records and their role in medical research

BATON ROUGE – Dr. Yun Shen and Dr. Gang Hu of Pennington Biomedical Research Center have recently published a piece in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, or JMIR. The study titled “Twenty-Five Years of Evolution and Hurdles in Electronic Health Records and Interoperability in Medical Research: Comprehensive Review,” explores how electronic health records’ use in medical research has evolved over the past 25 years.  Dr. Shen and Dr. Hu have extensive experience in working with electronic health records to study chronic diseases, population health trends, and predictive analytics. 

Primarily used for sharing patient data among healthcare providers, the two and a half decades of records have been funneled through big data analytics and the sophisticated applications of artificial intelligence, generating previously unseen patterns and driving medical innovations and insights.  

“Medical record keeping technically thousands of years ago as simple record keeping of treatments and symptoms, but modern medical record keeping first incorporated digitization as early as the 1960s,” said Dr. Shen, Assistant Professor of Chronic Disease Epidemiology Research at Pennington Biomedical. “Since that time, this method evolved from an effort to reduce physical storage to contributing to rich troves of data, which have informed and improved healthcare quality, safety and efficiency. Today, the big data generated from electronic medical records is supporting interoperability, seamless health information gathering and scanning of public health trends, even on a global scale.” 

A key aspect of electronic health record keeping is the separation of using the records for patient care and using them for research. Healthcare professions are instrumental in accurately documenting and gathering the data on the records, and may also input data related identifying information, patient demographics and billing information. A crucial step before such data is used for secondary research is deidentification, which involves removing or masking identifiable patient information to protect privacy. Data security and privacy concerns often influence how the collected information is used for research, and institutions have governing committees or boards to review research proposals for compliance. 

“Electronic Health Records have become a staple of the healthcare industry, and to explore the history of medical records and the growth of their application is crucial to understand how they can be used to advance medicine and improve outcomes,” said Dr. John Kirwan, Executive Director of Pennington Biomedical. “I congratulate Dr. Shen and Dr. Hu on the publication of this retrospective, and I look forward to what may result from it. We have teams of researchers here at Pennington Biomedical that pride themselves on pursuing new knowledge, including an exploration of new innovative AI tools that advance medical research." 

The study also includes a glimpse into the upcoming applications for electronic health records given its current trajectory, including precision medicine, social determinants of health, public health data, epidemiology data, data analytics, digital therapeutics, and further applications of artificial intelligence and wearable devices. Meanwhile, by engaging with healthcare institutions, policymakers, and technology developers, they also advocate for interdisciplinary partnerships that maximize the potential of EHRs in advancing precision medicine, epidemiology, and digital health solutions. 

Dr. Shen and Dr. Hu of Pennington Biomedical collaborated with Dr. Jiamin Yu and Dr. Jian Zhou of the Department of Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Shanghai Sixth People’s Hospital, which is an affiliate of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine in Shanghai, China.

About the Pennington Biomedical Research Center 

The Pennington Biomedical Research Center is at the forefront of medical discovery as it relates to understanding the triggers of obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and dementia. Pennington Biomedical has the vision to lead the world in promoting metabolic health and eliminating metabolic disease through scientific discoveries that create solutions from cells to society. The center conducts basic, clinical, and population research, and is a campus in the LSU System.  

The research enterprise at Pennington Biomedical includes over 530 employees within a network of 44 clinics and research laboratories, and 13 highly specialized core service facilities. Its scientists and physician/scientists are supported by research trainees, lab technicians, nurses, dietitians, and other support personnel. Pennington Biomedical is a globally recognized state-of-the-art research institution in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.   

For more information, see www.pbrc.edu.