You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Editorial
Routinely collected electronic health data and STI research: RECORD extension to the STROBE guidelines
  1. M Y Chen1,2,
  2. S Langan3,4,
  3. E I Benchimol5,6
  1. 1Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, Alfred Health, Melbourne, Australia
  2. 2Central Clinical School, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
  3. 3London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, UK
  4. 4St John's Institute of Dermatology, London, UK
  5. 5Department of Pediatrics and School of Epidemiology, Public Health and Preventive Medicine, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada
  6. 6Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences, Ottawa, Canada
  1. Correspondence to Dr M Y Chen, Melbourne Sexual Health Centre, 580 Swanston Street, Carlton, Victoria 3053, Australia; mchen{at}mshc.org.au

https://doi.org/10.1136/sextrans-2015-052360

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Electronic medical records (EMRs) are increasingly being used by health services including those that test for and treat sexually transmitted infections (STIs).1–3 The implementation of EMRs opens up new opportunities for improving the quality, effectiveness and efficiency of sexual health services and brings with it the potential for enhanced research capacity.1–3 Information from routinely collected health data can and should be leveraged for the evaluation of clinical services to improve STI and HIV care and to measure the impact of interventions aimed at curbing STI. This information has already been captured and, if appropriately harnessed, constitutes a rich repository of data that can be used for research.

    Because information in EMRs has generally been gathered for patient management rather than to answer research questions, the use of such data for studies introduces potential limitations and biases. When examining treatment outcomes retrospectively for instance, observational studies will naturally fall short of rigorously conducted randomised trials. However, prospective trials can be prohibitively expensive and their results may not be generalisable to diverse real world settings and populations. In addition, observational research carries with it specific …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Twitter Follow Eric Benchimol at @ericbenchimol

    • Contributors All authors have contributed to the writing of the editorial.

    • Competing interests None declared.

    • Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.