Electronic Medical Records and Machine Learning in Approaches to Drug Development

Abstract

Electronic medical records (EMRs) were primarily introduced as a digital health tool in hospitals to improve patient care, but over the past decade, research works have implemented EMR data in clinical trials and omics studies to increase translational potential in drug development. EMRs could help discover phenotype-genotype associations, enhance clinical trial protocols, automate adverse drug event detection and prevention, and accelerate precision medicine research. Although feasible, data mining in EMRs still faces challenges. Existing machine learning tools may help overcome these bottlenecks in EMR mining to unlock new approaches in drug development. This chapter will explore the role of EMRs in drug development while evaluating the viability and bottlenecks of their uses in data mining. This will include discussions on EMR usage in drug development while highlighting successful outcomes in oncology and exploring ML tools to complement and enhance EMR as a widely accepted drug-research source, a section on current clinical applications of EMRs, and a conclusion to summarize and imagine what a future drug research pipeline from EMR to patient treatment may look like