Evidence Hub

Secondary use of health records for prediction, detection, and treatment planning in the clinical decision support system: a systematic review

Pant D, Nytrø Ø, Leventhal BL, Clausen C, Koochakpour K, Stien L, Westbye OS, Koposov R et al.

BMC medical informatics and decision making, 2025

6 citations

Abstract

Background: This study aims to understand how secondary use of health records can be done for prediction, detection, treatment recommendations, and related tasks in clinical decision support systems.

Methods: Articles mentioning the secondary use of EHRs for clinical utility, specifically in prediction, detection, treatment recommendations, and related tasks in decision support were reviewed. We extracted study details, methods, tools, technologies, utility, and performance.

Results: We found that secondary uses of EHRs are primarily retrospective, mostly conducted using records from hospital EHRs, EHR data networks, and warehouses. EHRs vary in type and quality, making it critical to ensure their completeness and quality for clinical utility. Widely used methods include machine learning, statistics, simulation, and analytics. Secondary use of health records can be applied in any area of medicine. The selection of data, cohorts, tools, technology, and methods depends on the specific clinical utility.

Conclusion: The process for secondary use of health records should include three key steps: 1. Validation of the quality of EHRs, 2. Use of methods, tools, and technologies with proactive training, and 3. Multidimensional assessment of the results and their usefulness.

Trial registration: PROSPERO registration number CRD42023409582.

How strong is the evidence?

Evidence Hub reads this as a systematic review, done in people. Its evidence level is 1 of 5 (Highest · pooled evidence). Pooled evidence from several studies sits at the top of the evidence pyramid.

How the five levels of evidence work. The level is assigned automatically from the abstract and can be wrong, so check the paper.

Read the paper

Related studies

Go deeper in Evidence Hub

Evidence Hub adds a study data sheet (design, sample size, evidence level, key numbers), an AI summary and a chat grounded in the paper's text.

Open this study Sign up free