ArticlePreventive medicine reports2021
Developing a synthetic control group using electronic health records: Application to a single-arm lifestyle intervention study.
Article in Preventive medicine reports, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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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.
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.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed, 4 citations in OpenAlex.
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- Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The electronic health records (EHR) infrastructure offers a tremendous resource for identifying controls who match the characteristics of study participants in a single-arm trial. The objectives are to (1) demonstrate the feasibility of curating a synthetic control group for an existing study cohort through EHR data extraction and (2) evaluate the effect of a lifestyle intervention on selected cardiovascular health metrics. A total of 711 university employees were recruited between 2008 and 2012 to participate in a health partner intervention to improve cardiovascular health and were followed for five years. Data of nearly 8000 eligible subjects were extracted from the EHR to create a synthetic control cohort during the same study period. To minimize confounding, crude comparison, exact matching, propensity score matching, and doubly robust estimation were used to compare the selected cardiovascular health metrics at 1 and 5 years of follow-up. Blood pressure and body mass index improved in the intervention group compared to the EHR synthetic controls. The findings of changes in lipid measurements were somewhat unexpected. When analyzing the subgroup without lipid-lowering medications, the intervention group exhibited better control of cholesterol levels over time than did our synthetic controls. Some measurements in the EHR system may be more robust for synthetic selection than others. EHR synthetic controls can provide an alternative to estimate intervention effects appropriately in single-arm studies for these measurements.
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Registered trials
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.