A new cloud-based database that provides public access to approximately 50 million de-identified patient records going back five years was officially launched this week with the support of the White House Office of Science and Technology.
The MedRed BT Health Cloud currently features patient data from the United Kingdom, including information on physician encounters, acute-care interventions, pharmacy history and health outcomes data.
"People are using foreign data because it's available," MedRed CEO William Smith, MD, told InformationWeek. "The UK made some gutsy decisions about data liberation. There's political risk associated and they have a more tolerant climate over there."
Through integration with publicly available U.S. data, including adverse event reporting data from the Food and Drug Administration and Medicare data from CMS, the database's developers hope the information will prove useful in developing products and best practices to improve care delivery.
"Our goal is to take data that resides in disparate systems and make the necessary connections so that it can be transformed into knowledge and action. We believe such transformation benefits a wide variety of stakeholders across the healthcare spectrum," Dr. Smith said in a news release.
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