Partnerships With Health Plans to Link Data From Electronic Health Records to Claims for Research Using PCORnet®

Health plans and public payers (ie, Medicare and Medicaid) maintain records of millions of transactions between patients and health care providers from claims submitted by hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and other care settings. A major use of claims data in research is to supplement the information contained in patients' medical records. PCORnet is a large, distributed "network of networks" funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) to improve the nation's capacity to efficiently conduct definitive health research. Seventy-eight partner health systems nationwide map clinical data from their electronic health records to the PCORnet® Common Data Model (CDM) so that the data may be efficiently used for research purposes. The ability to link data from electronic health records in the PCORnet infrastructure with complementary data from other sources, such as health insurance claims, further enhances the capacity for comparative clinical effectiveness research (CER). This commentary showcases the health plan partnerships of 3 PCORnet® Clinical Research Networks (CRNs)-REACHnet, PaTH, and OneFlorida+-that enhance the capacity for CER involving linked clinical and claims data. We describe the transferable regulatory and technical infrastructures in place to efficiently link data for research purposes. To demonstrate these partnerships and data linkage in action, we also discuss research use cases pertaining to weight-related outcomes and diabetes that align with payers' interests in chronic disease management.