Document Type
Article
Original Publication Date
2015
Journal/Book/Conference Title
BMC Health Services Research
Volume
15
DOI of Original Publication
10.1186/s12913-015-1025-7
Date of Submission
April 2016
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
© DeShazo and Hoffman. 2015 n. Open Access This 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
Comments
Originally published at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12913-015-1025-7