Electronic health records: Implications for drug discovery

Electronic health records (EHRs) have increased in popularity in many countries. Pushed by legal mandates, EHR systems have seen substantial progress recently, including increasing adoption of standards, improved medical vocabularies and enhancements in technical infrastructure for data sharing across healthcare providers. Although the progress is directly beneficial to patient care in a hospital or clinical setting, it can also aid drug discovery. In this article, we review three specific applications of EHRs in a drug discovery context: finding novel relationships between diseases, re-evaluating drug usage and discovering phenotype–genotype associations. We believe that in the near future EHR systems and related databases will impact significantly how we discover and develop safe and efficacious medicines.