ArticleAutism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research2023
A practical approach to identifying autistic adults within the electronic health record.
Article in Autism research : official journal of the International Society for Autism Research, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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.
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
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Electronic Health Record-Based Phenotyping for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Algorithm Development and Multicenter Validation Study.JMIR mental health · 2026Article
- Health databases and early identification of autism spectrum disorder: a scoping review.BMJ open · 2026Article
- Natural Language Processing Applied to Psychiatric Clinical Notes: Scoping Review.JMIR medical informatics · 2026Article
- Suicide attempt risk in autism: a national EHR study of 2.3 million individuals.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2026Article
- Assessment of autonomic symptom scales in patients with neurodevelopmental diagnoses using electronic health record data.Research in autism spectrum disorders · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The electronic health record (EHR) provides valuable data for understanding physical and mental health conditions in autism. We developed an approach to identify charts of autistic young adults, retrieved from our institution's de-identified EHR database. Clinical notes within two cohorts were identified. Cohort 1 charts had at least one International Classification of Diseases (ICD-CM) autism code. Cohort 2 charts had only autism key terms without ICD-CM codes, and at least four notes per chart. A natural language processing tool parsed medical charts to identify key terms associated with autism diagnoses and mapped them to Unified Medical Language System Concept Unique Identifiers (CUIs). Average scores were calculated for each set of charts based on captured CUIs. Chart review determined whether patients met criteria for autism using a classification rubric. In Cohort 1, of 418 patients, 361 were confirmed to have autism by chart review. Sensitivity was 0.99 and specificity was 0.68 with positive predictive value (PPV) of 0.97. Specificity improved to 0.81 (sensitivity was 0.95; PPV was 0.98) when the number of notes was limited to four or more per chart. In Cohort 2, 48 of 136 patients were confirmed to have autism by chart review. Sensitivity was 0.95, specificity was 0.73, and PPV was 0.70. Our approach, which included using key terms, identified autism charts with high sensitivity, even in the absence of ICD-CM codes. Relying on ICD-CM codes alone may result in inclusion of false positive cases and exclusion of true cases with autism.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.