The National Library of Medicine (NLM) has awarded $1.3 million to researchers at Ohio State University College of Medicine's department of biomedical informatics. The award will support the development of a new approach to use electronic health records to identify candidates for clinical trials.
The biomedical informatics research team will be headed by assistant professor Albert Lai, PhD, director of the biomedical informatics program at the Center for Clinical and Translational Science.
The team's objective is to generate a longitudinal medical history that contains a comprehensive clinical summary of a patient. This is expected to improve patient screening and expedite recruitment of patients into clinical trials.
Lai calls the approach "information fusion," a method of processing computer data stored in uncoded narrative text fields, extracting structured data from unstructured data, merging multiple datasets, and binding episodic events together to create a medical "portrait" for individual patients.
