Development and validation of a classification approach for extracting severity automatically from electronic health records

摘要

BackgroundElectronic Health Records (EHRs) contain a wealth of information useful for studying clinical phenotype-genotype relationships. Severity is important for distinguishing among phenotypes; however other severity indices classify patient-level severity (e.g., mild vs. acute dermatitis) rather than phenotype-level severity (e.g., acne vs. myocardial infarction). Phenotype-level severity is independent of the individual patient’s state and is relative to other phenotypes. Further, phenotype-level severity does not change based on the individual patient. For example, acne is mild at the phenotype-level and relative to other phenotypes. Therefore, a given patient may have a severe form of acne (this is the patient-level severity), but this does not effect its overall designation as a mild phenotype at the phenotype-level.