The utility of general purpose versus specialty clinical databases for research: Warfarin dose estimation from extracted clinical variables

  • Authors:
  • Hersh Sagreiya;Russ B. Altman

  • Affiliations:
  • Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA;Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Biomedical Informatics
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

There is debate about the utility of clinical data warehouses for research. Using a clinical warfarin dosing algorithm derived from research-quality data, we evaluated the data quality of both a general-purpose database and a coagulation-specific database. We evaluated the functional utility of these repositories by using data extracted from them to predict warfarin dose. We reasoned that high-quality clinical data would predict doses nearly as accurately as research data, while poor-quality clinical data would predict doses less accurately. We evaluated the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) in predicted weekly dose as a metric of data quality. The MAE was comparable between the clinical gold standard (10.1mg/wk) and the specialty database (10.4mg/wk), but the MAE for the clinical warehouse was 40% greater (14.1mg/wk). Our results indicate that the research utility of clinical data collected in focused clinical settings is greater than that of data collected during general-purpose clinical care.