The rapid increase in the amount and variety of biomedical data offers innovative researchers new opportunities to advance medical knowledge and practice.

Advances in Health Care Through Aggregate Data: The electronic health record (EHR) for an individual patient is usually stored in a centrally housed data warehouse along with EHRs for thousands, or even millions, of other patients. This aggregate storage of information serves as a powerful resource in biomedical research.

• The data can be stratified for epidemiological research by common population factors such as age, gender or race.
• The data can also be stratified by more therapeutically relevant factors such as presence or absence of disease, disease stage, treatments, medications, family medical history or any attribute relevant to a research protocol.
• The integration of data from classical clinical sources with those from cutting-edge research-based sources such as genome-wide expression and genotyping microarrays, can yield powerful tools for development of diagnostics and therapeutics.
• Research can be conducted on the metadata, or data descriptors, in order to positively affect operational activities such as:
• Methods of data collection and storage
• Governance of health data, its uses, and granting access to different types of health information
• Integration of data from disparate sources
• The presence of time-based event capture within the EHR allows for modeling and simulation of population-based disease progression and other aspects of biosurveillance.