How AI is revolutionizing health care through real-world data
- kenashman
- Jun 12
- 1 min read
Published 1 June 2025
Turning real world data into insights
A lot has been said and written about the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) to advance and improve health care. And while there are still many challenges to overcome and questions to answer, one area in particular shows dramatic positive results.
The use of AI to unscramble the unstructured data from electronic health care records (EHR) is uncovering previously hidden insights and bringing significant advances to health care and clinical research.
EHR data, which captures patients’ medical histories, has long been recognized as a remarkable wealth of information. De-identified to protect patient privacy, the data can be mined to gain insights into disease trends, treatment effectiveness, and utilization patterns.
The challenge, however, is that most information in EHRs isn’t in formats that can be easily queried, compared, or analyzed. Structured data—things like patient vitals, medication records, diagnostic codes, procedure histories, and lab results—makes up only a portion of the EHR.
The remainder is unstructured, such as clinician notes, radiology reports, and images. This unstructured data holds great value, but making sense of it en masse has been resource intensive, if not impossible, until the advent of AI.
