LAUSR

Secondary use of routinely collected health care data has for long been promising to provide better and less costly care (1). Defined as the use of clinical routine data outside direct patient care, secondary use can have many and varied objectives, for example, improvement of patient safety, identification of “best practice” approaches, conducting clinical research, continuous quality measurements and reports, identification of room for quality improvement, optimization of clinical documentation and its supporting systems, public health tasks, business management, accreditation, identification of market potential and commercial use, fraud detection and prevention, surveillance of adherence to guidelines and standards, compliance control, teaching and training, and disease, case, and therapy management (2).