ArticleAnnals of epidemiology2019
Mind the gap: observation windows to define periods of event ascertainment as a quality control method for longitudinal electronic health record data.
Article in Annals of epidemiology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- Changes in weight and glycemia after initiation of integrase strand transfer inhibitors among people with HIV and diabetes.AIDS (London, England) · 2026Article
- Incident diabetes after switching to integrase strand transfer inhibitors in people with HIV in the USA and Canada: a cohort study.The lancet. HIV · 2026Article
- Clinical Predictors and Incidence of Kaposi Sarcoma Among Males With HIV in the Treat-All Era in the United States and Canada.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2026Article
- Comparative Effectiveness of ACE Inhibitors and Angiotensin Receptor Blockers for Cardiovascular Disease Prevention in People Living with HIV and Hypertension.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Life-years lost associated with mental disorders in people with HIV: a cohort study in South Africa, Canada and the United States.Journal of the International AIDS Society · 2025Article
- Direct-Acting Antiviral Initiation Among People With Hepatitis C Virus (HCV) and HIV on Antiretroviral Therapy in the United States and Canada: Factors Driving the HCV Treatment Gap.Open forum infectious diseases · 2025Article
- The Association of Anemia on Non-AIDS-Defining Cancer and Subsequent Survival Among People With HIV After Antiretroviral Initiation.Journal of acquired immune deficiency syndromes (1999) · 2025Article
- Evaluation of mean corpuscular volume among anemic people with HIV in North America following ART initiation.AIDS research and therapy · 2024Article
- Evaluating the Cardiovascular Risk in an Aging Population of People With HIV: The Impact of Hepatitis C Virus Coinfection.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2022Article
- Five-Year Mortality for Adults Entering Human Immunodeficiency Virus Care Under Universal Early Treatment Compared With the General US Population.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2022Article
- Association of the VACS Index With Hospitalization Among People With HIV in the NA-ACCORD.Journal of acquired immune deficiency syndromes (1999) · 2022Article
- CD4 Count at Entry into Care and at Antiretroviral Therapy Prescription among Adults with Human Immunodeficiency Virus in the United States, 2005-2018.Clinical infectious diseases : an official publication of the Infectious Diseases Society of America · 2021Article
- Racial, ethnic, and gender disparities in hospitalizations among persons with HIV in the United States and Canada, 2005-2015.AIDS (London, England) · 2021Article
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Authors and funding
21 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeUse of electronic health records (EHRs) in health research may lead to the false assumption of complete event ascertainment. We estimated "observation windows" (OWs), defined as periods within which the assumption of complete ascertainment of events is more likely to hold, as a quality control approach to reducing the likelihood of this false assumption. We demonstrated the impact of OWs on estimating the rates of type II diabetes mellitus (diabetes) from HIV clinical cohorts.
methodsData contributed by 16 HIV clinical cohorts to the NA-ACCORD were used to identify and evaluate OWs for an operationalized definition of diabetes occurrence as a case study. Procedures included (1) gathering cohort-level data; (2) visualizing and summarizing gaps in observations; (3) systematically establishing start and stop dates during which the assumption of complete ascertainment of diabetes events was reasonable; and (4) visualizing the diabetes OWs relative to the cohort open and close dates to identify immortal person-time. We estimated diabetes occurrence event rates and 95% confidence intervals in the most recent decade that data were available (January 1, 2007, to December 31, 2016).
resultsThe number of diabetes events decreased by 17% with the use of the diabetes OWs; immortal person-time was removed decreasing total person-years by 23%. Consequently, the diabetes rate increased from 1.23 (95% confidence interval [1.20, 1.25]) per 100 person-years to 1.32 [1.29, 1.35] per 100 person-years with the use of diabetes OWs.
conclusionsAs the use of EHR-curated data for event-driven health research continues to expand, OWs have utility as a quality control approach to complete event ascertainment, helping to improve accuracy of estimates by removing immortal person-time when ascertainment is incomplete.
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