Automating Access to Real-World Evidence

Introduction: Real-world evidence is important in regulatory and funding decisions. Manual data extraction from electronic health records (EHRs) is time-consuming and challenging to maintain. Automated extraction using natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence may facilitate this process. Whereas NLP offers a faster solution than manual methods of extraction, the validity of extracted data remains in question. The current study compared manual and automated data extraction from the EHR of patients with advanced lung cancer. Methods: Previously, we extracted EHRs from 1209 patients diagnosed with advanced lung cancer (stage IIIB or IV) between January 2015 and December 2017 at Princess Margaret Cancer Centre (Toronto, Canada) using the commercially available artificial intelligence engine, DARWEN (Pentavere, Ontario, Canada). For comparison, 100 of 333 patients that received systemic therapy were randomly selected and clinical data manually extracted by two trained abstractors using the same accepted gold standard feature definitions, including patient, disease characteristics, and treatment data. All cases were re-reviewed by an expert adjudicator. Accuracy and concordance between automated and manual methods are reported. Results: Automated extraction required considerably less time (