Introduction

According to the CMS study in 2021, almost all hospitals in the U.S. use an electronic health record (EHR) system to manage patient records. However, only about 62 percent of these hospitals can automatically (i.e., without manual data entry and extraction) ingest and transfer patient-level clinical data (data points like the history of diagnosis and treatment, lab test reports, demographics, SDOH, etc.) from their EHR systems to information systems inside or outside the hospitals. This paper focuses on the challenges associated with collecting, sharing and analyzing patient-level clinical data originating from EHR systems.