I am evaluating the contributions of alcohol based skin prep agents and surgical site infections using EMR based data. Is anyone doing similar work? I would like to hear from others who also conduct research using EMR data.
Hi Akkeneel, we don,t have an EMR per se, but we have an in house cardiac surgical register which captures preop, procedural and mort/morbidity data (30 day). We monitor outcomes and risk adjust a little, but our biggest problem is the lack of integration of our seperate clinical systems. We seem to be quite behind in this in Australian hospitals. We do link with the state Death registry and we can get whole of state readmissions to be able to monitor longer term outcomes, but we do not really do this consistently. It is difficult to get the prioritisation to do such studies beyond routine monitoring for peer review. We have done some studies across theICU and Cardiac Surgery databases (Article: Influence of timing of intraaortic balloon placement in cardiac surgical patients), but we have to merge the data first, however we can apply logistic regression to do a fair job of trying to account for confounding, etc. Also, the data is not truly of Regular EMR Quality as it is specifically captured as registry data after the care episode, therefore should be of higher quality. You are leading the way we need to be going by using your routinely collected data at your service front line to inform your care processes. Good luck!
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