The Serious Illness Population: Ascertainment via Electronic Health Record or Claims Data.

ABSTRACT:

Context

Palliative care can improve the lives of people with serious illness, yet clear operational definitions of this population do not exist. Prior efforts to identify this population have not focused on Medicare Advantage (MA) and commercial health plan enrollees.

Objectives

We aimed to operationalize our conceptual definition of serious illness to identify those with serious medical conditions (SMC) among commercial insurance and MA enrollees, and to compare the populations identified through electronic health record (EHR) or claims data sources.

Methods

We used de-identified claims and EHR data from the OptumLabs Data Warehouse (2016-2017), to identify adults age ≥18 with SMC and examine their utilization and mortality. Within the subset found in both data sourc

SUBMITTER: Kelley AS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8419009 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature