Duke, Cerner study seeks to give docs more insights into care

Duke Clinical Research Institute and electronic health records vendor Cerner are testing the Cerner Learning Health Network.

The network is designed to let clinicians more easily and efficiently gain insights that can guide the care they offer, along with help from automated clinical research registries.

The organizations will use the Cerner Health Network to evaluate the use and potential impact of proven therapies for chronic cardiovascular disease by bringing together data and intelligence.

Duke will use the Cerner network to analyze di-identified patient data from the University of Missouri HealthCare and Ascension Seton, in a partnership with Dell Medical School at the University of Texas at Austin to uncover the most effective treatment options.

The Duke Clinical Research Institute is the largest academic research organization in the world, conducting clinical trials, managing national patient registries, and performing outcomes research. Its work covers pediatrics, geriatrics, primary care, subspecialty medicine, genomics and proteomics. The institute also holds the largest and oldest institutional cardiovascular database in the world.


After the pilot, clients and researchers will have access to Cerner’s HealtheDataLab and Cerner’s HealtheIntent platform for population health management. Researchers can access de-identified patient data and transform it into research-ready formats to build complex models and algorithms. This will give providers more information to make more informed care decisions, such as being able to have patients that may be at risk for costly episodes of care and determining the best treatment options.

Ann Marie Navar, MD, a principal investigator and cardiovascular prevention researcher at the Duke Clinical Research Institute is ready for the new services.

“Current models for clinical research and registries that rely mostly on manual chart abstraction are too expensive, too slow and too small to continue,” she says. “We have to figure out better ways to leverage existing electronic resources to transform how we do clinical research.

“The electronic health record is a starting point and the HealtheIntent platform has all of the ingredients,” she adds. “It incorporates data from multiple EHRs, can link to national mortality and claims databases, and helps us harness the power and information security of cloud computing.