Pharmacovigilance Using Clinical Notes

With increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), there is an opportunity to use the free‐text portion of EHRs for pharmacovigilance. We present novel methods that annotate the unstructured clinical notes and transform them into a deidentified patient–feature matrix encoded using medical...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Clinical pharmacology and therapeutics 2013-06, Vol.93 (6), p.547-555
Main Authors: LePendu, P, Iyer, S V, Bauer-Mehren, A, Harpaz, R, Mortensen, J M, Podchiyska, T, Ferris, T A, Shah, N H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adverse Drug Reaction Reporting Systems
Biological and medical sciences
Data Mining
Drug Interactions
Drug-Related Side Effects and Adverse Reactions - epidemiology
Electronic Health Records
Humans
Medical sciences
Pharmacology. Drug treatments
Pharmacovigilance
Prevalence
United States - epidemiology
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:With increasing adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), there is an opportunity to use the free‐text portion of EHRs for pharmacovigilance. We present novel methods that annotate the unstructured clinical notes and transform them into a deidentified patient–feature matrix encoded using medical terminologies. We demonstrate the use of the resulting high‐throughput data for detecting drug–adverse event associations and adverse events associated with drug–drug interactions. We show that these methods flag adverse events early (in most cases before an official alert), allow filtering of spurious signals by adjusting for potential confounding, and compile prevalence information. We argue that analyzing large volumes of free‐text clinical notes enables drug safety surveillance using a yet untapped data source. Such data mining can be used for hypothesis generation and for rapid analysis of suspected adverse event risk. Clinical Pharmacology & Therapeutics (2013); 93 6, 547–555. doi:10.1038/clpt.2013.47
ISSN:0009-9236
1532-6535
DOI:10.1038/clpt.2013.47