Electronic Health Records

Fall 2026

Piyush Chaudhari | Qian Li

2026-09-04

Representation of Clinical Data

  • Digital version of a patient’s medical data and history
  • Maintained overtime by a healthcare provider
  • Stakeholders: Patients and healthcare providers such as physicians, nurses, billing team, …

Structured Data Elements

  • Diagnoses
  • Procedures
  • Medications
  • Laboratory results
  • Vital signs

Unstructured Data Elements

  • Clinical Notes
  • Imaging Order Reports
  • Pathology Reports
  • Patient Portal Messages

Electronic Health Records (EHR)

Fig 1. EPIC Systems

Fig 1. EPIC Systems

Fig 2. Cerner

Fig 2. Cerner

Clinical Data Warehouse/ Repository

Why?

  • EHR is designed to support clinical care and workflows, not necessarily research

  • EHR data is comprised of data from multiple sources and is not readily usable for downstream analysis, which gives rise to the need for a clinical data warehouse or repository

  • Clinical Data Warehouse (CDW) is a database that consolidates data from a variety of clinical sources to present a unified view of a single patient

  • It is optimized for record retrieval and reporting, which can be used for research, quality improvement, and operational purposes

  • Typically, CDWs include but are not limited to data elements like patient demographics, diagnoses, procedures, medications, laboratory results, and vital signs

UF Health Integrated Data Repository (IDR)

  • Large-scale clinical data warehouse (CDW)
  • UF Health data ~4 million patients
  • Developed over decades by Shands and UF Health decision support services/IT analytics, and CTSI
  • Supports both Epic-generated and non-Epic generated data
  • Supports clinical, operational, and research missions

IDR Data Lineage

Fig 3. UF Health Data Lineage

Fig 3. UF Health Data Lineage

Data Modalities curated by IDR Research Data Services

  • Structured Data
  • Clinical Notes
  • Radiology Images and Reports
  • Pathology Reports
  • MyChart Patient Portal Data
  • Social Determinants of Health data from EPIC
  • Genomic Module

Key IDR Research Data Services Initiatives

  • Self-Service Tools for Cohort Discovery and Data Extraction

    • UF Health i2b2
    • OneFlorida+ i2b2
    • OHDSI ATLAS

  • Data Standardization and Harmonization with Common Data Models

    • OMOP Common Data Model
    • PCORnet
    • i2b2

  • Multimodal Data Curation for research

  • Digital Twin - deploying computable phenotypes and establishing loyalty cohorts

  • Collaboration with research teams

    • UF Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI)
    • UF Health Cancer Institute
    • Intelligent Clinical Center Center (IC3)
    • OneFlorida+ Clinical Research Consortium
    • College of Dentistry

Contact IDR Research Data Services

UF Health IDR

Email IDR at IRBDataRequest@ahc.ufl.edu for any questions or concerns