Final Post
Introduction Throughout the course of this class, I have been fascinated about the role of data in shaping our world today. This fascination, especially how it relates to healthcare, was captured a few years ago when I attended a lecture about information technology and information sharing as it related to the health industry. The speaker, a former UA graduate currently working with Microsoft, told a story of a rare childhood disease with no real cures due to the complexity are rarity of the illness (they had no real data on it and had no idea how to treat it). Her company worked with doctors all over the world to set up a database where information the collected about this disease could be shared and analyzed by doctors all over the world. The result: doctors were able to greatly increase the survival rate of these children and hope to one day find a cure for good. This story, coupled with more I began to learn about Electronic Health Records led me to want to investigate what EHRs