Information Discovery on Electronic Health Records Using Authority Flow Techniques

Authors

Vagelis Hristidis, School of Computing and Information Science, Florida International UniversityFollow
Ramakrishna R. Varadarajan, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Paul Biondich, Regenstrief Institute; Indiana University School of Medicine
Michael Weiner, Regenstrief Institute; Indiana University School of Medicine; Indiana University Center for Health Services and Outcomes Research; VA HSR&D Center of Excellence on Implementing Evidence-Based Practice, Rischard L. Roudebush VA Medical Center

Date of this Version

10-22-2010

Document Type

Article

Abstract

Background

As the use of electronic health records (EHRs) becomes more widespread, so does the need to search and provide effective information discovery within them. Querying by keyword has emerged as one of the most effective paradigms for searching. Most work in this area is based on traditional Information Retrieval (IR) techniques, where each document is compared individually against the query. We compare the effectiveness of two fundamentally different techniques for keyword search of EHRs.

Methods

We built two ranking systems. The traditional BM25 system exploits the EHRs' content without regard to association among entities within. The Clinical ObjectRank (CO) system exploits the entities' associations in EHRs using an authority-flow algorithm to discover the most relevant entities. BM25 and CO were deployed on an EHR dataset of the cardiovascular division of Miami Children's Hospital. Using sequences of keywords as queries, sensitivity and specificity were measured by two physicians for a set of 11 queries related to congenital cardiac disease.

Results

Our pilot evaluation showed that CO outperforms BM25 in terms of sensitivity (65% vs. 38%) by 71% on average, while maintaining the specificity (64% vs. 61%). The evaluation was done by two physicians.

Conclusions

Authority-flow techniques can greatly improve the detection of relevant information in EHRs and hence deserve further study.

Comments

Originally published in BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License.

Recommended Citation

Hristidis et al.: Information Discovery on Electronic Health Records Using Authority Flow Techniques. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making 2010 10:64. doi:10.1186/1472-6947-10-64