'Best Care for My Patient' will give clinicians data-driven treatment insights, says Epic

Now, said Dr. Jackie Gerhart, a physician at Epic who works in clinical informatics, the electronic health vendor is seeking to help clinicians use that data to shape patient care on an individualized level. Gerhart sat down with Healthcare IT News at HIMSS22 to discuss Epic's wide-ranging patient database, Epic Research findings and how its forthcoming Best Care for My Patient tool can show clinicians others' most effective practices around the country. A. Our role is to, number one, help with research and development in the software; number two, work on any new futures project, so things like data or any kind of analytics that could be used at the point of care or for future research. Q. We've been hearing a lot about Epic's Cosmos database, which draws on de-identified patient records from its customers. The goal is, unlike a lot of other healthcare databases, you have to contribute data into it in order to be able to use the data from it – meaning all the different customers that are part of the community can choose to be part of Cosmos. We use that data for research, so anybody that's at an organization that contributes to Cosmos can do a query of the data. We've been doing a lot of work with the CDC through COVID, and particularly working on larger data sets that the CDC may either not have access to right away, or they might not have a representative sample. Our research team and our data scientists will design a study along with the CDC, we'll run the data, and then we'll hopefully work together to put it out into a record. So on one team, there's a clinician, a data scientist and usually some kind of public health or research background person.