The Sentinel Initiative
The goal of the Sentinel initiative is establishment of a virtual, national network of available electronic health care databases from insurance, HMO and academic organizations (data partners). Once data partners are linked through the Sentinel system, every group in the link can learn more than any one group can learn alone. The proposed network will satisfy requirements of the Food and Drug Administration Amendments Act of 2007 (FDAAA) that direct FDA to develop methods to obtain access to disparate data sources and establish a post-market risk identification and analysis system. The law sets a goal to have access to data from 25 million patients by July, 2010; and access to data from 100 million patients by July, 2012. These goals have already been met by the Mini Sentinel pilot led by Harvard Pilgrim Healthcare Institute that was initiated in September 2009.
