I have been working part-time on a project for the Great Plains Collaborative (GPC) under the direction of Russ Waitman and the gentle guidance of Dan Connolly, both at Kansas University Medical Center. I hoping to submit a paper soon on the work I’ve done, but if you are curious about the size and scope of the electronic health records that I’ve been slinging around, this blog entry might help.
The i2b2 repository I am working with is called Heron, and each monthly update of Heron is named after a body of water in the seven states represented in the GPC. The Lake Michigan version of Heron has over 2 billion observations. It includes information from the electronic health record (EHR) system used at Kansas University Hospital (Epic) in areas like alerts, allergy reports, demographics, diagnoses, medical history, lab results, medications and procedures. Heron also has linked patient records in the EHR to patient records in the SEER Cancer Registry and the National Cardiovascular Data Registry. You can find documentation about the GPC at the PCORI website, in a JAMIA article, or at the GPC website itself.
You can find an earlier version of this page on my blog.