Using electronically available inpatient hospital data for research.
Despite a push to create electronic health records and a plethora of healthcare data from disparate sources, there are no data from a single electronic source that provide a full picture of a patient's hospital course. This paper describes a process to utilize electronically available inpatient hospital data for research. We linked several different sources of extracted data, including clinical, procedural, administrative, and accounting data, using patients' medical record numbers to compile a cohesive, comprehensive account of patient encounters. Challenges encountered included (1) interacting with distinct administrative units to locate data elements; (2) finding a secure, central location to house the data; (3) appropriately defining health measures of interest; (4) obtaining and linking these data to create a usable format for conducting research; and (5) dealing with missing data. Although the resulting data set is incredibly rich and likely to prove useful for a wide range of clinical and comparative effectiveness research questions, there are multiple challenges associated with linking hospital data to improve the quality of patient care.
School of Nursing, Columbia University, New York, New York, USA.
Mandar
M
Apte
Matthew
M
Neidell
E Yoko
EY
Furuya
David
D
Caplan
Sherry
S
Glied
Elaine
E
Larson
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D002405:Catheterization, Central Venous / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D003141:Communicable Diseases / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000382:microbiology; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005260:Female; D006761:Hospitals / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D007297:Inpatients; D008297:Male; D009518:New York / Q000453:epidemiology; D010351:Patient Discharge / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D013223:Statistics as Topic