Reusing routine electronic health record data for nationwide COVID-19 surveillance in nursing homes: barriers, facilitators, and lessons learned

Despite the urgent need for information on the spread of SARS-CoV-2 among nursing home residents, setting up a repository based on EHR data proved challenging. The facilitators and barriers found in this study affected the extent to which the data could be used. We formulated nine lessons learned for developing future repositories based on EHR data for surveillance and research purposes. These lessons were in three main areas: legal framework, contextual circumstances, and quality of the data. Currently, these lessons are being applied in setting up a new registry in the nursing home sector.