Meeting national and international goals for improving health care: The role of information technology in medical research

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 side-effects 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.