Healthcare utilization is a collider: an introduction to collider bias in EHR data reuse.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Collider bias is a common threat to internal validity in clinical research but is rarely mentioned in informatics education or literature. Conditioning on a collider, which is a variable that is the shared causal descendant of an exposure and outcome, may result in spurious associations between the exposure and outcome. Our objective is to introduce readers to collider bias and its corollaries in the retrospective analysis of electronic health record (EHR) data.

Target audience

Collider bias is likely to arise in the reuse of EHR data, due to data-generating mechanisms and the nature of healthcare access and utilization in the United States. Therefore, this tutorial is aimed at informaticians and other EHR data consumers without a background in epidemiological met

SUBMITTER: Weiskopf NG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10114115 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature