Meeting National and International Goals for Improving Health Care: The Role of Information Technology in Medical Research

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009This presentation was part of the session : Achieving National and Global GoalsThis material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder. ©2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.Modernizing our health care system will lead to improvements in medical research. Health informatics will allow medical researchers to determine the effectiveness of a particular treatment for a given population or to discover the harmful sideeffects of a drug. While some of this research will occur in the private sector, public investment in this area will also be important. This report finds that both the United States and the United Kingdom commit roughly the same percentage of total public medical research funds to health informatics. However, the United Kingdom has a much richer data set of patient data available for research. To benefit from the full potential of health informatics, the United States should develop the capability to share medical data for authorized research in a timely and efficient manner.Information Technology and Innovation Foundatio