Population-Level Studies Reveal Ways to Enhance Patient Care and Improve Public Health

Surveys show that the American public supports having their personal health information used in research to inform public policy and practice, as long as appropriate privacy protections are in place. Large, population-level healthcare databases enable researchers to discover answers to questions that can not be found with individual studies or clinical trials alone. By aggregating data from many sources, population studies can help to evaluate health care treatment patterns, examine the quality of care being delivered to patients, identify disparities in treatment and outcomes, and estimate the economic burden of disease on individuals and society.