EHRs Aid In Quick Data Collection For Cardiac Research

By Katie Wike, contributing writer

Using the data from electrocardiographs contained within EHRs, researchers are able to study cardiac function and structure

Researchers from Vanderbilt University have determined electronic health records (EHRs) can be used in researching cardiac function and structure. According to Health Data Management, EHRs are an efficient way for researchers to extract electrocardiograph data.

“Measures of cardiac structure and function are important human phenotypes that are associated with a range of clinical outcomes,” explains the study, published in the Journal of Clinical Bioinformatics. “Studying these traits in large populations can be time consuming and costly. Utilizing data from large electronic medical records (EMRs) is one possible solution to this problem.”

After reviewing more than 6,000 echocardiography reports from over 2,800 adults dating back to 1997, Vanderbilt determined that EHRs can make “major contributions” to the study of cardiac functions. According to iHealth Beat, they also discovered that when using the electronic records, missing data was uncommon; more than 90 percent of data points were found during the extraction and only 1 percent required manual review. Any irregularities that did present were the result of inconsistent use of measurement units or errors in transcription.

Researchers concluded, “These results demonstrate that echocardiographic data can be efficiently extracted from EMRs, and suggest that EMR-based cohorts have the potential to make major contributions toward the study of epidemiologic and genotype-phenotype associations for cardiac structure and function in diverse populations.”

“Echocardiographic data from the EMR environment can be rapid and efficient, and suggest that EMR-based cohorts have the potential to be important data sources for the study of cardiac structure and function.”