Opinion: Hospitals' database will push pediatric research

I participated in a conference call last week related to a new, national child-health research program. On a website shared among the call participants, I am quite sure I witnessed the future of pediatric research. It's called PEDSnet, and it is a common data platform that eight leading children's hospitals, including Nationwide Children's, contribute to. The platform houses detailed information from electronic health records and other data sources to address research questions that cannot be answered any other way. Currently, millions of health-care visits for hundreds of diseases are kept in a confidential, anonymous manner in the PEDSnet database.