Are you looking at diagnoses?  If so, the diagnoses will be listed in the EHR.

I'm just not sure what exactly you're looking for - can you explain a little more?

Thanks --- Melissa Barthold

Dear Melissa,Thank you for your interest. My research is actually focused in how can we assess the value of sensibility of this aspects throughout  digital clinical documents. More in concrete, can we identify from diagnoses if we have a child abuse case, for instance?

Ah!  I get it now.

I think you'd possibly need to define what you're looking for in the EHR.  What words are associated with child abuse?  'Frequent ER visits'....or.....'falls often'....??  If you could identify those words - you could certainly run a report on an EHR for those (tho probably download into a data warehouse and run the SQL query there.)

I've already an ontology addressing the key concepts of child abuse and a system that can identify  them in documents. The question is how can we measure the evidences of child abuse cases, i.e. frequency of symptoms, multiplicity of symptoms or old injuries.

many thanks,

Tiago Rui Pereira

Tiago - You have the ontology --(that is a lot of work - wonderful!!)

If you're working with a data warehouse -- can you write a simple SQL query looking for those words that you've identified as indicators of child abuse?   I think I'd be tempted to make it a 'make-table' query...and let it pull the appropriate data for the records that include the identified words.  Would that work?

Perhaps, but my prototype retrieve topics from non structured documents, identify the concepts related to the ontology and as output I get the concepts that occur in that documents. Know I need Expert Judgement on  how can we classify it as more or less important for further analysis from clinic personal.