A rule-based electronic phenotyping algorithm for detecting clinically relevant cardiovascular disease cases

BACKGROUND: The implementation of electronic medical records (EMR) is becoming increasingly common. Error and data loss reduction, patient-care efficiency increase, decision-making assistance and facilitation of event surveillance, are some of the many processes that EMRs help improve. In addition, they show a lot of promise in terms of data collection to facilitate observational epidemiological studies and their use for this purpose has increased significantly over the recent years. Even though the quantity and availability of the data are clearly improved thanks to EMRs, still, the problem of the quality of the data remains. This is especially important when attempting to determine if an event has actually occurred or not. We sought to assess the sensitivity, specificity, and agreement level of a codes-based algorithm for the detection of clinically relevant cardiovascular (CaVD) and cerebrovascular (CeVD) disease cases, using data from EMRs. METHODS: Three family physicians from the research group selected clinically relevant CaVD and CeVD terms from the international classification of primary care, Second Edition (ICPC-2), the ICD 10 version 2015 and SNOMED-CT 2015 Edition. These terms included both signs, symptoms, diagnoses and procedures associated with CaVD and CeVD. Terms not related to symptoms, signs, diagnoses or procedures of CaVD or CeVD and also those describing incidental findings without clinical relevance were excluded. The algorithm yielded a positive result if the patient had at least one of the selected terms in their medical records, as long as it was not recorded as an error. Else, if no terms were found, the patient was classified as negative. This algorithm was applied to a randomly selected sample of the active patients within the hospital’s HMO by 1/1/2005 that were 40–79 years old, had at least one year of seniority in the HMO and at least one clinical encounter. Thus, patients were classified into four groups: (1) Negative patients (2) Patients with CaVD but without CeVD; (3) Patients with CeVD but without disease CaVD; (4) Patients with both diseases. To facilitate the validation process, a stratified sample was taken so that each of the groups represented approximately 25% of the sample. Manual chart review was used as the gold standard for assessing the algorithm’s performance. One-third of the patients were assigned randomly to each reviewer (Cohen’s kappa 0.91). Both coded and un-coded (free text) sections of the EMR were reviewed. This was done from the first present clinical note in the patients chart to the last one registered prior to 1/1/2005. RESULTS: The performance of the algorithm was compared against manual chart review. It yielded high sensitivity (0.99, 95% CI 0.938–0.9971) and acceptable specificity (0.86, 95% CI 0.818–0.895) for detecting cases of CaVD and CeVD combined. A qualitative analysis of the false positives and false negatives was performed. CONCLUSIONS: We developed a simple algorithm, using only standardized and non-standardized coded terms within an EMR that can properly detect clinically relevant events and symptoms of CaVD and CeVD. We believe that combining it with an analysis of the free text using an NLP approach would yield even better results. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13104-017-2600-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.