title: Patient characteristics associated with venous thromboembolic events: a cohort study using pooled electronic health record data.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To demonstrate the potential of de-identified clinical data from multiple healthcare systems using different electronic health records (EHR) to be efficiently used for very large retrospective cohort studies.
  
  
  METHODS
  Data of 959 030 patients, pooled from multiple different healthcare systems with distinct EHR, were obtained. Data were standardized and normalized using common ontologies, searchable through a HIPAA-compliant, patient de-identified web application (Explore; Explorys Inc). Patients were 26 years or older seen in multiple healthcare systems from 1999 to 2011 with data from EHR.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Comparing obese, tall subjects with normal body mass index, short subjects, the venous thromboembolic events (VTE) OR was 1.83 (95% CI 1.76 to 1.91) for women and 1.21 (1.10 to 1.32) for men. Weight had more effect then height on VTE. Compared with Caucasian, Hispanic/Latino subjects had a much lower risk of VTE (female OR 0.47, 0.41 to 0.55; male OR 0.24, 0.20 to 0.28) and African-Americans a substantially higher risk (female OR 1.83, 1.76 to 1.91; male OR 1.58, 1.50 to 1.66). This 13-year retrospective study of almost one million patients was performed over approximately 125 h in 11 weeks, part time by the five authors.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  As research informatics tools develop and more clinical data become available in EHR, it is important to study and understand unique opportunities for clinical research informatics to transform the scale and resources needed to perform certain types of clinical research.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  With the right clinical research informatics tools and EHR data, some types of very large cohort studies can be completed with minimal resources.
authors: Department of Information Services, The MetroHealth System, Cleveland, Ohio, USA. david.kaelber@case.edu
authors: David C
authors: DC
authors: Kaelber
authors: Wendy
authors: W
authors: Foster
authors: Jason
authors: J
authors: Gilder
authors: Thomas E
authors: TE
authors: Love
authors: Anil K
authors: AK
authors: Jain
mesh_terms: D001827:Body Height; D015992:Body Mass Index; D003625:Data Collection / Q000379:methods*; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D020407:Internet; D008297:Male; D008875:Middle Aged; D012189:Retrospective Studies; D012307:Risk Factors; D012984:Software; D017432:Unified Medical Language System; D014481:United States / Q000453:epidemiology; D054556:Venous Thromboembolism / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000517:prevention & control*