Integration of the patient electronic health record (EHR) with publicly accessible information creates new opportunities and challenges for clinical research and patient care. For example, one challenge is that the complexity of the information provided to the clinician must not impair the clinician’s ability to accurately and rapidly prescribe drugs that are safe and effective for a specific patient, and covered by the patient’s insurance provider. An example opportunity is that EHRs enable the identification of adverse events and outbreak awareness and provide a rich set of longitudinal data, from which researchers and clinicians can study disease, co-morbidity and treatment outcome. Moreover, the increased desire to rapidly translate.
