NIH's All of Us Adds Thousands of EHRs via Clinical Networks
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- All of Us has collected health and wellness data on nearly 750,000 participants since 2018, including genome sequences, Fitbit data, family history surveys, and real-world medical records available for researcher use.
- All of Us announced its latest data release on Tuesday, securing thousands of electronic medical records through an innovative use of patient data-sharing networks primarily used to coordinate clinical care.
- The program's database has a significant data gap: more than 300,000 of the 750,000 participants have no EHR data at all, even though 98% of participants agreed to share their electronic health records for research.
- NIH's All of Us initiative offers researchers a potentially easier path to acquire real-world data for clinical research by leveraging care-coordination networks, with medical records that can span a patient's entire health journey.
Why it matters: Researchers using the All of Us database have faced an incomplete picture despite near-universal consent — 300,000+ of 750,000 participants had zero EHR data. By tapping networks built for clinical care coordination, the program aims to deliver richer longitudinal records that better reflect patients' real-world health journeys, directly improving the utility of one of the largest precision medicine datasets in existence.
