Opportunities and Challenges in Leveraging Electronic Health Record Data in Oncology

The widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) and the growing wealth of digitized information sources about patients is ushering in an era of 'Big Data' that may revolutionize clinical research in oncology. Research will likely be more efficient and potentially more accurate than the current gold standard of manual chart review studies. However, EHRs as they exist today have significant limitations: important data elements are missing or are only captured in free text or PDF documents. Using two case studies, we illustrate the challenges of leveraging the data that are routinely collected by the healthcare system in EHRs (e.g., real-world data), specific challenges encountered in the cancer domain and opportunities that can be achieved when these are overcome.