Along with blood and saliva samples and survey information, electronic health records (EHRs) help advance scientific discoveries in the Kaiser Permanente Research Bank (KPRB). This article describes how EHRs are transformed into data that helps KPRB scientists turn their ideas into scientific discoveries.
EHRs contain records of patients’ diagnoses, medications, lab results, procedures, and surgeries. It is the system Kaiser Permanente physicians, nurses, other clinicians, and medical assistants use when they’re seeing patients. One of the KPRB’s very strong features is that it includes participants’ KP EHRs. Most biobanks are not directly associated with a health care system.
The KP Research Bank is especially well positioned with regard to EHRs because of the investment of Kaiser Permanente scientists and staff 25 years ago. In 2001, Kaiser Permanente scientists had the idea to develop a “virtual data warehouse” or VDW to support innovative and landmark health research. Kaiser Permanente’s VDW includes fully de-identified information about diagnoses, test results, and treatments. This data model for epidemiological and health services research was so innovative at the time that it served as a model for other national organizations’ VDWs, including the FDA’s Sentinel Initiative and PCORI’s National Patient-Centered Clinical Research Network.
The VDW supports scientists doing research using KPRB data. For example, in this edition of the newsletter, we also include a story on how the integrated use of KPRB and VDW data are key to helping physician-scientists understand which types of patients benefit most and least from the new GLP-1 drugs.
The KP Research Bank’s data-provisioning team is a group of analysts who prepare VDW and KPRB data for scientists to use for approved research. The amount of work needed to transform data varies depending on the project. For example, some projects only require a limited amount of information, like participants’ age, KPRB survey responses, and the recently created genetic data from blood and saliva samples. This process only takes analysts a few days.
On the other hand, complex projects can require weeks of work. For example, for a recent project on kidney disease, scientists required information from various lab results, procedures, and medications over many years so they could study how these factors were related to each other. This required finding answers for questions such as, did patients have their medications within two weeks of having a procedure? How recent was their follow-up? What were the results of that follow-up? How many follow-up labs were there a few years after the procedure? Did everyone have the same kind of follow-up? Were there other serious diagnoses that the patients had?
The data-provisioning team’s efforts are part of the detailed work that make KP Research Bank’s scientific advances possible. It’s a reminder of how many individuals it takes to produce scientific discoveries from the KPRB: Kaiser Permanente members who chose to become KPRB participants; the KPRB laboratory staff who receive and process blood samples; all clinical staff who carefully enter our health and care information into the EHR; the KPRB staff who organize and “clean” the clinical data so it can be used as research data; administrative and leadership staff, and of course, all the scientists and their staff who conduct research to answer these questions to improve our collective health. To learn more about Kaiser Permanente Research Bank staff and leadership, click here.
