Biases introduced by filtering electronic health records for patients with "complete data".

Objective: One promise of nationwide adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) is the availability of data for large-scale clinical research studies. However, because the same patient could be treated at multiple health care institutions, data from only a single site might not contain the complete medical history for that patient, meaning that critical events could be missing. In this study, we evaluate how simple heuristic checks for data "completeness" affect the number of patients in the resulting cohort and introduce potential biases.

Suboptimal Clinical Documentation in Young Children with Severe Obesity at Tertiary Care Centers.

The prevalence of severe obesity in children has doubled in the past decade. The objective of this study is to identify the clinical documentation of obesity in young children with a BMI ≥ 99th percentile at two large tertiary care pediatric hospitals. We used a standardized algorithm utilizing data from electronic health records to identify children with severe early onset obesity (BMI ≥ 99th percentile at age <6 years).

Federating clinical data from six pediatric hospitals: process and initial results from the PHIS+ Consortium.

Integrating clinical data with administrative data across disparate electronic medical record systems will help improve the internal and external validity of comparative effectiveness research. The Pediatric Health Information System (PHIS) currently collects administrative information from 43 pediatric hospital members of the Child Health Corporation of America (CHCA). Members of the Pediatric Research in Inpatient Settings (PRIS) network have partnered with CHCA and the University of Utah Biomedical Informatics Core to create an enhanced version of PHIS that includes clinical data.

Discovering knowledge on pediatric fluid therapy and dysnatremias from quantitative data found in electronic medical records.

It is accepted that intravenous fluid (IVF) therapy can result in hospital-acquired dysnatremias in pediatric patients, with associated morbidity and mortality. There is interest in improving IVF therapy to prevent dysnatremias, but the optimal approach is controversial. In this study, we develop Natremia Deviation and Intravenous Renderer (NaDIR), a tool that preprocesses large volumes of electronic medical record data obtained from an academic pediatric hospital in order to analyze (1) IVF therapy, (2) the epidemiology of dysnatremias, and (3) the impact of IVFs on changes in serum sodium (ΔS(Na)).

A web and handheld based diagnosis & procedure tracking system.

Personal computing devices such as personal organizers, handheld PC's, and tablet PC's are becoming common tools in clinical care and medical education. There is an increasing need for these devices to track various tasks students and medical trainees perform. In particular, in undergraduate medical education, there is a need for tracking the depth and breadth of each student's clinical encounters over the course of his or her education.