"surveys, censuses, vital statistics, and other health-related data" are fine, but I'd still like to see us using our electronic health records to compile anonymized epidemiological data. I work in healthcare IT, specifically in clinical apps and interfaces, and I've watched us moving at a snail's pace, for instance, the USA just recently moving to ICD-10 coding, which the rest of the world was already using for quite some time. Currently our interoperability between systems relies on HL7 interfaces, which the better vendors are slowly upgrading to the new FHIR format, but that just covers the local other systems that you do a very narrow range of business with. Beyond that, interoperability is based on the ability of each system to output a formatted record for each individual patient (for instance, when transferring to another hospital). There's nothing like all of our records going into one big, anonymized database. But the potential is there. We've got mostly everybody on electronic records (over time you're penalized in reimbursment for failing to adopt), we've standardized our billing and coding formats to capture more granular data-- so the data is there, it's *using* the data that we haven't gotten to yet.

Last edited by Flint (2/11/2021 3:16 pm)