Reproducibility of i2b2 NLP selection of RA patients across multiple academic health centers

A very nice result of i2b2, Vanderbilt and Northwestern teams with remarkable reproducibility (much better than I have seen for inter-expert variability in other studies) of the automated natural language processing-driven selection of patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis.

i2b2-based Registry for Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis

This article: http://jamia.bmj.com/content/early/2012/06/24/amiajnl-2012-001042.full.pdf+html describes what appears to be the largest U.S. registry for pediatric rheumatoid arthritides. It uses a multi-site SHRINE query system atop dozens of i2b2 instances representing most large sites in this country.

Pharmacoepidemiology

Dan Solomon gave a very comprehensive overview of the art and science of pharmaco-epidemiology in our monthly all-hands meeting. Special emphasis on the particular problems of using EHR data.

SHRINE (Distributed Queries Across Hospitals) for the Study of Peripartum Cardiomyopathy

Recently published in Nature is a study entitled "Cardiac angiogenic imbalance leads to peripartum cardiomyopathy." On close review we were pleasantly surprised to see:

Retrospective analyses of PPCM and pre-eclampsia in the Harvard teaching hospitals were performed using the Harvard Shared Health Research Information Network (SHRINE)[ref], a de-identified repository of aggregate patient information.

This is all the more exciting because none of the i2b2 core team were aware of this study that used this distributed query mechanism across multiple health centers. There are now a half doze SHRINE network operational nationwide (some of which go coast to coast) and so we anticipate that there will be many more such unanticipated results.