Frederick Masoudi , MD, is the Professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology, University of Colorado with 260 publications in PubMed. His research interests focuses on practice patterns and health outcomes in older patient populations with heart failure and acute coronary syndromes. At the Chinese Heart Congress 2014 he gave us the speech on “Conducting research with observational data: challenges and opportunities”. Annals of Translational Medicine (ATM) is honored to invite Prof. Masoudi for an interview to share his perspective on the observational data used in research and the role of the US National Cardiovascular Data Registries (NCDR) in this regard.