Disease associations depend on visit type: results from a visit-wide association study

Widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) increased the number of reported disease association studies, or Phenome-Wide Association Studies (PheWAS). Traditional PheWAS studies ignore (i.e., department/service conducting the visit). In this study, we investigate the role of visit type o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:BioData mining 2019-07, Vol.12 (1), p.15-10, Article 15
Main Authors: Boland, Mary Regina, Alur-Gupta, Snigdha, Levine, Lisa, Gabriel, Peter, Gonzalez-Hernandez, Graciela
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Algorithms
Cancer
Cancer diagnosis
Communicable diseases
Data mining
Electronic records
Medical care utilization
Medical informatics
Medical records
Methods
Short Report
Statistics
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Summary:Widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) increased the number of reported disease association studies, or Phenome-Wide Association Studies (PheWAS). Traditional PheWAS studies ignore (i.e., department/service conducting the visit). In this study, we investigate the role of visit type on disease association results in the first Visit-Wide Association Study or 'VisitWAS'. We studied this visit type effect on association results using EHR data from the University of Pennsylvania. Penn EHR data comes from 1,048 different departments and clinics. We analyzed differences between cancer and obstetrics/gynecologist (Ob/Gyn) visits. Some findings were expected (i.e., increase of neoplasm diagnoses among cancer visits), but others were surprising, including an increase in infectious disease conditions among those visiting the Ob/Gyn. We conclude that assessing visit type is important for EHR studies because different medical centers have different visit type distributions. To increase reproducibility among EHR data mining algorithms, we recommend that researchers report visit type in studies.
ISSN:1756-0381
1756-0381
DOI:10.1186/s13040-019-0203-2