Work

Re: Inaccuracies in electronic health records smoking data and a potential approach to address resulting underestimation in determining lung cancer screening eligibility

Year: 2022

Type: letter

Abstract: Dear Editor, We agree with Drs. Tarabichi and Thornton on the importance of smoking history documentation in the electronic health record (EHR) for determining lung cancer screening eligibility. Drs. Tarabichi and Thornton also highlight an underappreciated advantage of lung cancer risk prediction: risk-based screening thresholds are less vulnerable to sub-optimally collected pack-year information. Their findings align with other work we have done where we found that unreliable pack-year information leads to less misclassification when using risk-based selection compared to using a pack-year eligibility criterion for patient selection.1 The growing body of literature on this topic, including those by ourselves, Drs. Tarabichi and Thornton, and others, underscores the potential for leveraging EHR capabilities to optimize the identification of high-risk patients for lung cancer screening.1–5 This body of literature underscores the ubiquitous and consequential nature of EHR smoking data inaccuracies and the need for additional research to generalize findings and to identify potential solutions.

Source: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association

DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocac119

Authors: Polina Kukhareva, Tanner Caverly, Kensaku Kawamoto

Institutions: University of Utah, VA Center for Clinical Management Research

Language: English

Topic: Electronic Health Records Systems

Subfield: Health Information Management

Field: Health Professions

Domain: Health Sciences

SDG: Good health and well-being

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities