Using Clinical Data Repositories to Assess the Clinical and Financial Burden of Disease: The Example of Mitral Regurgitation

Although there have been tremendous advances in understanding various disease outcomes, there are significant gaps and the associated costs to investigate disease burden can be exorbitant. Clinical data repositories can be a valuable aid for analysing patient and disease characteristics in a faster and most cost-effective manner. We offer our own example, using mitral regurgitation as the illustration of a disease process that was identified through the use of a clinical data repository in a subset of patients, matched with a control population, and then analysed for clinical and financial factors. Increasing adoption of digital systems to store and analyse large volumes of data paired with incentives by the government and various health systems makes the current environment ripe for an explosion of big data to help guide clinical decision making.