EDM forum supplement overview.

BACKGROUND: The Agency for Health Research and Quality funded the Electronic Data Methods Forum (EDM Forum) to share the experiences and learnings from 11 research teams funded through three different grant programs, each of which involve the use of electronic clinical data in Comparative Effectiveness Research and Patient-Centered Outcomes Research.

OBJECTIVES: This overview is meant to describe the context in which the EDM forum was created and to introduce the set of papers in this supplement to Medical Care that describe the challenges and approaches to the use of electronic clinical data in the three key areas of analytic methods, clinical informatics and data governance.

CONCLUSIONS: The participants in the EDM Forum are providing innovative approaches to generate information that can support the building of a "learning health care system." The compilation of papers presented in this supplement should serve as a resource to others working to develop the infrastructure for collecting, validating and using electronic data for research.