By Hannah Burkhardt, PhD, Principal Software Engineer at Truveta
As a member of the biomedical informatics research community, I was incredibly excited to join Truveta. From the beginning, it was striking to see the company solving—at national scale—problems that researchers in my field have been working on for decades.
Since joining, one of my personal goals has been to help bring greater visibility to Truveta’s technical innovations within the broader informatics community, which spans academia, industry, and government. Although Truveta is already recognized for its impact on health outcomes research, many of the fundamental technical advances that make that impact possible have remained largely unknown outside the company. And there is a long list of advances that revolutionize EHR data research: a streamlined and increasingly automated syntactic and semantic normalization process; linking of multimodal data, including structured data as well as notes, images, and claims; automated notes concept extraction; ongoing data quality checks; ongoing refreshes to incorporate the newest health system member data every single day; our unique health system member governance system, which works to ensure tight feedback loops for ongoing expansion and improvements of the dataset; and intelligence that uses advanced AI to deliver scientifically rigorous, data-driven answers directly from real-time real-world care.
In a significant milestone for Truveta and a culmination of more than a year of collaboration across Truveta, we have published a scientific manuscript in JAMIA Open describing Truveta’s technical innovations for enabling the secondary use of electronic health record (EHR) data for research.
JAMIA Open is published by the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), the premier professional society for biomedical informatics. Its journals and conferences, including Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) and JAMIA Open, are among the discipline’s most respected and influential publications.
Research published through AMIA reaches the core community advancing clinical informatics, translational informatics, public health informatics, and health data science Findings in this journal have frequently driven new investigations and discoveries, informed national policy surrounding EHR adoption and interoperability, and globally advanced the goal of transforming routinely collected clinical data into actionable knowledge.
Biomedical informatics emerged as a distinct scientific discipline in the latter half of the twentieth century as computing, statistics, and information science converged with medicine. Early efforts focused on clinical decision support, hospital information systems, and standardized medical vocabularies, but the field rapidly expanded to encompass comprehensive electronic health records (EHRs), biomedical knowledge representation, translational research, public health informatics, and artificial intelligence—from pioneering expert systems such as MYCIN to modern machine learning, large language models, and agentic AI.
Throughout its history, a central objective of biomedical informatics has been to modernize healthcare by transforming fragmented clinical documentation into computable, interoperable data that improve patient care, accelerate scientific discovery, and support evidence-based decision making. This work coalesced around the vision of the Learning Health System, articulated by the US National Academy of Medicine (NAM)—one of the nation’s most influential scientific advisory organizations, whose landmark consensus reports have shaped federal health policy, research priorities, and investments in healthcare modernization for decades.
In the Learning Health System, every patient encounter contributes to continuously improving medical knowledge through the routine analysis of high-quality clinical data. Decades of work—including the development of interoperability standards, clinical terminologies, EHR data models, and machine learning and AI for medicine—have made this vision increasingly attainable.
Today, Truveta is helping bring that vision to life at unprecedented scale, with ready-to-use data for more than 140 million de-identified patients. By developing technologies that harmonize and normalize EHR data across dozens of health systems while enabling trustworthy analytics and next-generation AI, Truveta is advancing one of biomedical informatics’ longest-standing ambitions and accelerating a national priority championed by the NAM.
Publishing these innovations in a respected, peer-reviewed, and citable scientific venue is an important step, not only for Truveta, but for the broader biomedical informatics community. It enables researchers across academia, industry, healthcare, and government to recognize and learn from the technical innovations that underpin Truveta’s mission of Saving Lives with Data.
