A step closer to nationwide electronic health record-based chronic disease surveillance: characterizing asthma prevalence and emergency department utilization from 100 million patient records through a novel multisite collaboration.

OBJECTIVE

The study sought to assess the feasibility of nationwide chronic disease surveillance using data aggregated through a multisite collaboration of customers of the same electronic health record (EHR) platform across the United States.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

An independent confederation of customers of the same EHR platform proposed and guided the development of a program that leverages native EHR features to allow customers to securely contribute de-identified data regarding the prevalence of asthma and rate of asthma-associated emergency department visits to a vendor-managed repository. Data were stratified by state, age, sex, race, and ethnicity. Results were qualitatively compared with national survey-based estimates.

RESULTS

The program accumulated information from 100 million health records from over 130 healthcare systems in the United States over its first 14 months. All states were represented, with a median coverage of 22.88% of an estimated state's population (interquartile range, 12.05%-42.24%). The mean monthly prevalence of asthma was 5.27 ± 0.11%. The rate of asthma-associated emergency department visits was 1.39 ± 0.08%. Both measures mirrored national survey-based estimates.

DISCUSSION

By organizing the program around native features of a shared EHR platform, we were able to rapidly accumulate population level measures from a sizeable cohort of health records, with representation from every state. The resulting data allowed estimates of asthma prevalence that were comparable to data from traditional epidemiologic surveys at both geographic and demographic levels.

CONCLUSIONS

Our initiative demonstrates the potential of intravendor customer collaboration and highlights an organizational approach that complements other data aggregation efforts seeking to achieve nationwide EHR-based chronic disease surveillance.