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Background: The Affordable Care Act encourages healthcare systems to integrate behavioral and medical healthcare, as well as to employ electronic health records (EHRs) for health information exchange and quality improvement. Pragmatic research paradigms that employ EHRs in research are needed to produce clinical evidence in real-world medical settings for informing learning healthcare systems. Adults with comorbid diabetes and substance use disorders (SUDs) tend to use costly inpatient treatments; however, there is a lack of empirical data on implementing behavioral healthcare to reduce health risk in adults with high-risk diabetes. Given the complexity of high-risk patients' medical problems and the cost of conducting randomized trials, a feasibility project is warranted to guide practical study designs., Methods: We describe the study design, which explores the feasibility of implementing substance use Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) among adults with high-risk type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) within a home-based primary care setting. Our study includes the development of an integrated EHR datamart to identify eligible patients and collect diabetes healthcare data, and the use of a geographic health information system to understand the social context in patients' communities. Analysis will examine recruitment, proportion of patients receiving brief intervention and/or referrals, substance use, SUD treatment use, diabetes outcomes, and retention., Discussion: By capitalizing on an existing T2DM project that uses home-based primary care, our study results will provide timely clinical information to inform the designs and implementation of future SBIRT studies among adults with multiple medical conditions., (Copyright © 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Medication non-adherence is a major public health issue, and measuring non-adherence is a crucial step toward improving it. A paucity of retrievable data prevents researchers from effectively measuring, tracking and sharing outcomes on medication management. High quality data derived from prescribing patterns, including behavioral and technology-based interventions, is necessary to support meaningful use, improve publicly reported quality metrics, and develop strategies to improve medication management. Electronic health records make medication data more numerous and accessible, yet the reliability and utility of electronically available data elements that reflect adherence has not been well established. We sought to explore the types of medication-related data captured over time in a series of patient encounters (n=5500) in a population-based intervention in four U.S. counties in the SouthEastern Diabetes Initiative (SEDI). The purpose was to evaluate data generated through routine healthcare delivery that are repurposed (ie, "secondary use") for research/QI/population health.

Purpose: Data generated in the care of patients are widely used to support clinical research and quality improvement, which has hastened the development of self-service query tools. User interface design for such tools, execution of query activity, and underlying application architecture have not been widely reported, and existing tools reflect a wide heterogeneity of methods and technical frameworks. We describe the design, application architecture, and use of a self-service model for enterprise data delivery within Duke Medicine., Methods: Our query platform, the Duke Enterprise Data Unified Content Explorer (DEDUCE), supports enhanced data exploration, cohort identification, and data extraction from our enterprise data warehouse (EDW) using a series of modular environments that interact with a central keystone module, Cohort Manager (CM). A data-driven application architecture is implemented through three components: an application data dictionary, the concept of "smart dimensions", and dynamically-generated user interfaces., Results: DEDUCE CM allows flexible hierarchies of EDW queries within a grid-like workspace. A cohort "join" functionality allows switching between filters based on criteria occurring within or across patient encounters. To date, 674 users have been trained and activated in DEDUCE, and logon activity shows a steady increase, with variability between months. A comparison of filter conditions and export criteria shows that these activities have different patterns of usage across subject areas., Conclusions: Organizations with sophisticated EDWs may find that users benefit from development of advanced query functionality, complimentary to the user interfaces and infrastructure used in other well-published models. Driven by its EDW context, the DEDUCE application architecture was also designed to be responsive to source data and to allow modification through alterations in metadata rather than programming, allowing an agile response to source system changes., (Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.)

Objectives: The goal of this survey is to discuss the impact of the growing availability of electronic health record (EHR) data on the evolving field of Clinical Research Informatics (CRI), which is the union of biomedical research and informatics., Results: Major challenges for the use of EHR-derived data for research include the lack of standard methods for ensuring that data quality, completeness, and provenance are sufficient to assess the appropriateness of its use for research. Areas that need continued emphasis include methods for integrating data from heterogeneous sources, guidelines (including explicit phenotype definitions) for using these data in both pragmatic clinical trials and observational investigations, strong data governance to better understand and control quality of enterprise data, and promotion of national standards for representing and using clinical data., Conclusions: The use of EHR data has become a priority in CRI. Awareness of underlying clinical data collection processes will be essential in order to leverage these data for clinical research and patient care, and will require multi-disciplinary teams representing clinical research, informatics, and healthcare operations. Considerations for the use of EHR data provide a starting point for practical applications and a CRI research agenda, which will be facilitated by CRI's key role in the infrastructure of a learning healthcare system.

Objective: This study compares the yield and characteristics of diabetes cohorts identified using heterogeneous phenotype definitions., Materials and Methods: Inclusion criteria from seven diabetes phenotype definitions were translated into query algorithms and applied to a population (n=173 503) of adult patients from Duke University Health System. The numbers of patients meeting criteria for each definition and component (diagnosis, diabetes-associated medications, and laboratory results) were compared., Results: Three phenotype definitions based heavily on ICD-9-CM codes identified 9-11% of the patient population. A broad definition for the Durham Diabetes Coalition included additional criteria and identified 13%. The electronic medical records and genomics, NYC A1c Registry, and diabetes-associated medications definitions, which have restricted or no ICD-9-CM criteria, identified the smallest proportions of patients (7%). The demographic characteristics for all seven phenotype definitions were similar (56-57% women, mean age range 56-57 years).The NYC A1c Registry definition had higher average patient encounters (54) than the other definitions (range 44-48) and the reference population (20) over the 5-year observation period. The concordance between populations returned by different phenotype definitions ranged from 50 to 86%. Overall, more patients met ICD-9-CM and laboratory criteria than medication criteria, but the number of patients that met abnormal laboratory criteria exclusively was greater than the numbers meeting diagnostic or medication data exclusively., Discussion: Differences across phenotype definitions can potentially affect their application in healthcare organizations and the subsequent interpretation of data., Conclusions: Further research focused on defining the clinical characteristics of standard diabetes cohorts is important to identify appropriate phenotype definitions for health, policy, and research.

Widespread sharing of data from electronic health records and patient-reported outcomes can strengthen the national capacity for conducting cost-effective clinical trials and allow research to be embedded within routine care delivery. While pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) have been performed for decades, they now can draw on rich sources of clinical and operational data that are continuously fed back to inform research and practice. The Health Care Systems Collaboratory program, initiated by the NIH Common Fund in 2012, engages healthcare systems as partners in discussing and promoting activities, tools, and strategies for supporting active participation in PCTs. The NIH Collaboratory consists of seven demonstration projects, and seven problem-specific working group 'Cores', aimed at leveraging the data captured in heterogeneous 'real-world' environments for research, thereby improving the efficiency, relevance, and generalizability of trials. Here, we introduce the Collaboratory, focusing on its Phenotype, Data Standards, and Data Quality Core, and present early observations from researchers implementing PCTs within large healthcare systems. We also identify gaps in knowledge and present an informatics research agenda that includes identifying methods for the definition and appropriate application of phenotypes in diverse healthcare settings, and methods for validating both the definition and execution of electronic health records based phenotypes.

Purpose: Poor adherence to prescribed medicines is associated with increased rates of poor outcomes, including hospitalization, serious adverse events, and death, and is also associated with increased healthcare costs. However, current approaches to evaluation of medication adherence using real-world electronic health records (EHRs) or claims data may miss critical opportunities for data capture and fall short in modeling and representing the full complexity of the healthcare environment. We sought to explore a framework for understanding and improving data capture for medication adherence in a population-based intervention in four U.S. counties., Approach: We posited that application of a data model and a process matrix when designing data collection for medication adherence would improve identification of variables and data accessibility, and could support future research on medication-taking behaviors. We then constructed a use case in which data related to medication adherence would be leveraged to support improved healthcare quality, clinical outcomes, and efficiency of healthcare delivery in a population-based intervention for persons with diabetes. Because EHRs in use at participating sites were deemed incapable of supplying the needed data, we applied a taxonomic approach to identify and define variables of interest. We then applied a process matrix methodology, in which we identified key research goals and chose optimal data domains and their respective data elements, to instantiate the resulting data model., Conclusions: Combining a taxonomic approach with a process matrix methodology may afford significant benefits when designing data collection for clinical and population-based research in the arena of medication adherence. Such an approach can effectively depict complex real-world concepts and domains by "mapping" the relationships between disparate contributors to medication adherence and describing their relative contributions to the shared goals of improved healthcare quality, outcomes, and cost.

Data within a continuing use context (also known as secondary use) can require translation into the variables necessary for project analysis. We have developed and applied a framework in which: Project objectives inform the curation of data elements. Data elements are rendered into system-readable metadata. Metadata are applied to the source data and used to produce data sets. This process distinguishes between data sets and source data. Data sets contain project-specific variables that are structured for analytic activities. This can differ from source data, which may be stored in a structure dictated by the original source system for data collection, or in a data structure contrary to what is desired for analysis. Data elements mediate this translation, and the process of curation refines their definitions and associated attributes. This framework improves analysis workflow through the application of best practices, consistent processes, and centralized decision-making.

Large amounts of information, as well as opportunities for informing research, education, and operations, are contained within clinical text such as radiology reports and pathology reports. However, this content is less accessible and harder to leverage than structured, discrete data. We report on an extension to the Duke Enterprise Data Unified Content Explorer (DEDUCE), a self-service query tool developed to provide clinicians and researchers with access to data within the Duke Medicine Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW). The DEDUCE Clinical Text module supports ontology-based text searching, enhanced filtering capabilities based on document attributes, and integration of clinical text with structured data and cohort development. The module is implemented with open-source tools extensible to other institutions, including a Java-based search engine (Apache Solr) with complementary full-text indexing library (Lucene) employed with a negation engine (NegEx) modified by clinical users to include to local domain-specific negation phrases.