Classic health care research has centered on studying a group of individuals and then extrapolating the findings to the general population. In this context, evaluating the association between nonrandomized exposures and clinical outcomes can yield interesting, hypothesis-generating correlations, but assembling evidence to suggest a causal relationship has focused on testing the relationship between randomized exposures and clinical outcomes1 (Figure). Clinical research has reached a pivotal moment, not only with the exponential expansion of tools for data capture as well as data sources, but also with the opportunity to reevaluate howto integrate the information to optimize medical decision making. First, increasingly more data will be available in the form of advanced diagnostics, electronic health records, and mobile digital technologies.
展开▼
