Document Type

Article

Original Publication Date

2015

Journal/Book/Conference Title

BMC Health Services Research

Volume

15

Issue

2015

DOI of Original Publication

10.1186/s12913-015-1025-7

Comments

Originally published at http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-015-1025-7

Date of Submission

November 2015

Abstract

Background

The growing availability of electronic health records (EHRs) in the US could provide researchers with a more detailed and clinically relevant alternative to using claims-based data.

Methods

In this study we compared a very large EHR database (Health Facts©) to a well-established population estimate (Nationwide Inpatient Sample). Weighted comparisons were made using t-value and relative difference over diagnoses and procedures for the year 2010.

Results

The two databases have a similar distribution pattern across all data elements, with 24 of 50 data elements being statistically similar between the two data sources. In general, differences that were found are consistent across diagnosis and procedures categories and were specific to the psychiatric–behavioral and obstetrics–gynecology services areas.

Conclusions

Large EHR databases have the potential to be a useful addition to health services researchers, although they require different analytic techniques compared to administrative databases; more research is needed to understand the differences.

Rights

Copyright © DeShazo and Hoffman. 2015 Open AccessThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Is Part Of

VCU Health Administration Publications

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