Evidence map›Paper›PMID 24727481›Full record

ArticleJournal of biomedical informatics2014

Identifying and mitigating biases in EHR laboratory tests.

Rimma Pivovarov, David J Albers, Jorge L Sepulveda, Noémie Elhadad

Open access · greenAbstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Journal of biomedical informatics, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 56 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
56citing papers in PubMed, 3 pooled it
9.3field-weighted citation impact, top 2% of its field
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

56 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 96 citations in OpenAlex.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Pooled it
  3. Pooled it
  4. Trial
  5. Article
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  9. Evaluating Large Language Models in Extracting Cognitive Exam Dates and Scores.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2024
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  13. Phenomics and Robust Multiomics Data for Cardiovascular Disease Subtyping.Arteriosclerosis, thrombosis, and vascular biology · 2023
    Review
  14. Building the Model.Archives of pathology & laboratory medicine · 2023
    Review
  15. Article
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  18. Inferring EHR Utilization Workflows through Audit Logs.AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium · 2022
    Article
  19. Article
  20. Big Data in Nephrology.Nature reviews. Nephrology · 2021
    Review
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.

Rimma PivovarovDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, 622 W. 168th Street, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: rp2521@columbia.edu.
David J AlbersDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, 622 W. 168th Street, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: dja2119@cumc.columbia.edu.
Jorge L SepulvedaDepartment of Pathology and Cell Biology, Columbia University, 630 W. 168th Street, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: jls2282@columbia.edu.
Noémie ElhadadDepartment of Biomedical Informatics, Columbia University, 622 W. 168th Street, New York, NY, USA. Electronic address: noemie.elhadad@columbia.edu.
Columbia University · USColumbia University Irving Medical Center · US

Funding

Training in Biomedical Informatics at Columbia UniversityT15LM007079 · NLM · COLUMBIA UNIV NEW YORK MORNINGSIDE · PI NOEMIE ELHADAD, GEORGE M HRIPCSAK · 1992 to 2026
$28.9M
DISCOVERING AND APPLYING KNOWLEDGE IN CLINICAL DATABASESR01LM006910 · NLM · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · PI HRIPCSAK, GEORGE M · 2000 to 2023
$10.6M
An NLP Approach to Generating Patient Record SummariesR01LM010027 · NLM · COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY HEALTH SCIENCES · PI ELHADAD, NOEMIE · 2009 to 2010
$912k
NLM NIH HHS R01 LM006910NLM NIH HHS R01 LM010027NLM NIH HHS R01 LM06910NLM NIH HHS T15 LM007079
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Electronic health record (EHR) data show promise for deriving new ways of modeling human disease states. Although EHR researchers often use numerical values of laboratory tests as features in disease models, a great deal of information is contained in the context within which a laboratory test is taken. For example, the same numerical value of a creatinine test has different interpretation for a chronic kidney disease patient and a patient with acute kidney injury. We study whether EHR research studies are subject to biased results and interpretations if laboratory measurements taken in different contexts are not explicitly separated. We show that the context of a laboratory test measurement can often be captured by the way the test is measured through time. We perform three tasks to study the properties of these temporal measurement patterns. In the first task, we confirm that laboratory test measurement patterns provide additional information to the stand-alone numerical value. The second task identifies three measurement pattern motifs across a set of 70 laboratory tests performed for over 14,000 patients. Of these, one motif exhibits properties that can lead to biased research results. In the third task, we demonstrate the potential for biased results on a specific example. We conduct an association study of lipase test values to acute pancreatitis. We observe a diluted signal when using only a lipase value threshold, whereas the full association is recovered when properly accounting for lipase measurements in different contexts (leveraging the lipase measurement patterns to separate the contexts). Aggregating EHR data without separating distinct laboratory test measurement patterns can intermix patients with different diseases, leading to the confounding of signals in large-scale EHR analyses. This paper presents a methodology for leveraging measurement frequency to identify and reduce laboratory test biases.

Indexed as

ArtifactsData Interpretation, StatisticalClinical Laboratory Information SystemsConfounding Factors, EpidemiologicData MiningElectronic Health RecordsNew YorkPattern Recognition, AutomatedBiasConfoundingElectronic health recordInformation theoryLaboratory testingMissing data

Identifiers

PMID24727481
PMCPMC4194228
OpenAlexW2152726215

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceTDM
Read underepoch 390

Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.