Using electronically available inpatient hospital data for research.

Mandar Apte, Matthew Neidell, E. Yoko Furuya, David Caplan, Sherry Glied, Elaine Larson

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)338-345
Number of pages8
JournalClinical and translational science
Volume4
Issue number5
DOIs
StatePublished - Oct 2011

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • General Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics
  • General Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
  • General Neuroscience

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