Detection of pharmacovigilance-related adverse events using electronic health records and automated methods.

ABSTRACT: Electronic health records (EHRs) are an important source of data for detection of adverse drug reactions (ADRs). However, adverse events are frequently due not to medications but to the patients' underlying conditions. Mining to detect ADRs from EHR data must account for confounders. We developed an automated method using natural-language processing (NLP) and a knowledge source to differentiate cases in which the patient's disease is responsible for the event rather than a drug. Our method was applied to 199,920 hospitalization records, concentrating on two serious ADRs: rhabdomyolysis (n = 687) and agranulocytosis (n = 772). Our method automatically identified 75% of the cases, those with disease etiology. The sensitivity and specificity were 93.8% (confidence interval: 88.9-96.7%) and 91

SUBMITTER: Haerian K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3685297 | biostudies-literature | 2012 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature