Use of electronic health record data from diverse primary care practices to identify and characterize patients' prescribed common medications

Utilization of EHRs for clinical trials: a systematic review

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Clinical trials are of high importance for medical progress. This study conducted a systematic review to identify the applications of EHRs in supporting and enhancing clinical trials.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

A systematic search of PubMed was conducted on 12/3/2023 to identify relevant studies on the use of EHRs in clinical trials. Studies were included if they (1) were full-text journal articles, (2) were written in English, (3) examined applications of EHR data to support clinical trial processes (e.g. recruitment, screening, data collection). A standardized form was used by two reviewers to extract data on: study design, EHR-enabled process(es), related outcomes, and limitations.

RESULTS

Following full-text review, 19 studies met the predefined eligibility criteria and were included. Overall, included studies consistently demonstrated that EHR data integration improves clinical trial feasibility and efficiency in recruitment, screening, data collection, and trial design.

CONCLUSIONS

According to the results of the present study, the use of Electronic Health Records in conducting clinical trials is very helpful. Therefore, it is better for researchers to use EHR in their studies for easy access to more accurate and comprehensive data. EHRs collects all individual data, including demographic, clinical, diagnostic, and therapeutic data. Moreover, all data is available seamlessly in EHR. In future studies, it is better to consider the cost-effectiveness of using EHR in clinical trials.

HoneyDetails: A prototype for ensuring patient’s information privacy and thwarting electronic health record threats based on decoys

Advancements in electronic health record system allow patients to store and selectively share their medical records as needed with doctors. However, privacy concerns represent one of the major threats facing the electronic health record system. For instance, a cybercriminal may use a brute-force attack to authenticate into a patient’s account to steal the patient’s personal, medical or genetic details. This threat is amplified given that an individual’s genetic content is connected to their family, thus leading to security risks for their family members as well. Several cases of patient’s data theft have been reported where cybercriminals authenticated into the patient’s account, stole the patient’s medical data and assumed the identity of the patients. In some cases, the stolen data were used to access the patient’s accounts on other platforms and in other cases, to make fraudulent health insurance claims. Several measures have been suggested to address the security issues in electronic health record systems. Nevertheless, we emphasize that current measures proffer security in the short-term. This work studies the feasibility of using a decoy-based system named HoneyDetails in the security of the electronic health record system. HoneyDetails will serve fictitious medical data to the adversary during his hacking attempt to steal the patient’s data. However, the adversary will remain oblivious to the deceit due to the realistic structure of the data. Our findings indicate that the proposed system may serve as a potential measure for safeguarding against patient’s information theft.