Evaluation of the secondary use of electronic health records to detect seasonal, holiday-related, and rare events related to traumatic injury and poisoning.

Though EHR systems were developed to prioritize operational rather than analytic priorities and have consequent limitations for surveillance, our EHR enrichment analysis nonetheless re-identified expected temporal population health patterns. EHRs are potentially a valuable source of information to inform public health policy, both in retrospective analysis and in a surveillance capacity.