Phenotyping to Facilitate Accrual for a Cardiovascular Intervention.

BACKGROUND: The conventional approach for clinical studies is to identify a cohort of potentially eligible patients and then screen for enrollment. In an effort to reduce the cost and manual effort involved in the screening process, several studies have leveraged electronic health records (EHR) to refine cohorts to better match the eligibility criteria, which is referred to as phenotyping. We extend this approach to dynamically identify a cohort by repeating phenotyping in alternation with manual screening. METHODS: Our approach consists of multiple screen cycles. At the start of each cycle, the phenotyping algorithm is used to identify eligible patients from the EHR, creating an ordered list such that patients that are most likely eligible are listed first. This list is then manually screened, and the results are analyzed to improve the phenotyping for the next cycle. We describe the preliminary results and challenges in the implementation of this approach for an intervention study on heart failure. RESULTS: A total of 1,022 patients were screened, with 223 (23%) of patients being found eligible for enrollment into the intervention study. The iterative approach improved the phenotyping in each screening cycle. Without an iterative approach, the positive screening rate (PSR) was expected to dip below the 20% measured in the first cycle; however, the cyclical approach increased the PSR to 23%. CONCLUSIONS: Our study demonstrates that dynamic phenotyping can facilitate recruitment for prospective clinical study. Future directions include improved informatics infrastructure and governance policies to enable real-time updates to research repositories, tooling for EHR annotation, and methodologies to reduce human annotation.

The Biobank Portal for Partners Personalized Medicine: A Query Tool for Working with Consented Biobank Samples, Genotypes, and Phenotypes Using i2b2.

We have designed a Biobank Portal that lets researchers request Biobank samples and genotypic data, query associated electronic health records, and design and download datasets containing de-identified attributes about consented Biobank subjects. This do-it-yourself functionality puts a wide variety and volume of data at the fingertips of investigators, allowing them to create custom datasets for their clinical and genomic research from complex phenotypic data and quickly obtain corresponding samples and genomic data. The Biobank Portal is built upon the i2b2 infrastructure [1] and uses an open-source web client that is available to faculty members and other investigators behind an institutional firewall. Built-in privacy measures [2] ensure that the data in the Portal are utilized only according to the processes to which the patients have given consent.

Taking advantage of continuity of care documents to populate a research repository.

OBJECTIVE: Clinical data warehouses have accelerated clinical research, but even with available open source tools, there is a high barrier to entry due to the complexity of normalizing and importing data. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology's Meaningful Use Incentive Program now requires that electronic health record systems produce standardized consolidated clinical document architecture (C-CDA) documents. Here, we leverage this data source to create a low volume standards based import pipeline for the Informatics for Integrating Biology and the Bedside (i2b2) clinical research platform. We validate this approach by creating a small repository at Partners Healthcare automatically from C-CDA documents. MATERIALS AND METHODS: We designed an i2b2 extension to import C-CDAs into i2b2. It is extensible to other sites with variances in C-CDA format without requiring custom code. We also designed new ontology structures for querying the imported data. RESULTS: We implemented our methodology at Partners Healthcare, where we developed an adapter to retrieve C-CDAs from Enterprise Services. Our current implementation supports demographics, encounters, problems, and medications. We imported approximately 17 000 clinical observations on 145 patients into i2b2 in about 24 min. We were able to perform i2b2 cohort finding queries and view patient information through SMART apps on the imported data. DISCUSSION: This low volume import approach can serve small practices with local access to C-CDAs and will allow patient registries to import patient supplied C-CDAs. These components will soon be available open source on the i2b2 wiki. CONCLUSIONS: Our approach will lower barriers to entry in implementing i2b2 where informatics expertise or data access are limited.

Evaluation of matched control algorithms in EHR-based phenotyping studies: a case study of inflammatory bowel disease comorbidities.

The success of many population studies is determined by proper matching of cases to controls. Some of the confounding and bias that afflict electronic health record (EHR)-based observational studies may be reduced by creating effective methods for finding adequate controls. We implemented a method to match case and control populations to compensate for sparse and unequal data collection practices common in EHR data. We did this by matching the healthcare utilization of patients after observing that more complete data was collected on high healthcare utilization patients vs. low healthcare utilization patients. In our results, we show that many of the anomalous differences in population comparisons are mitigated using this matching method compared to other traditional age and gender-based matching. As an example, the comparison of the disease associations of ulcerative colitis and Crohn's disease show differences that are not present when the controls are chosen in a random or even a matched age/gender/race algorithm. In conclusion, the use of healthcare utilization-based matching algorithms to find adequate controls greatly enhanced the accuracy of results in EHR studies. Full source code and documentation of the control matching methods is available at https://community.i2b2.org/wiki/display/conmat/.