Pediatric gastroenterologist Steven Miller discusses his recent research paper on databases for Crohn’s disease case definitions. This data provides additional support for processing administrative claims and can help with prescribing medications and treatment. Visit this website to learn more about this research.
Hi, my name is steve Miller. I'm an assistant professor of pediatric gastroenterology. Hepatology and nutrition here at johns Hopkins and a board certified clinical informatization which means that I study how doctors and patients can use technology to improve care. Today I'm going to present a paper that combines my G. I. Interest in Crohn's disease with cutting edge data science. The paper is called a systematic review of Crohn's disease case definitions in administrative or claims databases. So to start, Crohn's disease is an inflammatory condition of the gut that causes G. I. Bleeding and scarring and affects more than 100,000 patients in the U. S. And several million worldwide studying Crohn's requires the creation of big data sets. Basically lists of patients with information about medications that were used to treat them and outcomes of care like need for surgery. We can use this data to learn how effective medicines are or to make predictions about how patient is going to do based on their disease state, which is helpful for doctors when they treat patients. A big source of data is administrative claims basically patient lists put together by insurance companies or big national patient lists that compile all the information entered by doctors and nurses for the purpose of billing. And a big problem is how to make sure that a patient who looks like they have Crohn's actually has it called the case definition Here. I'm going to show you the best way to answer this dry but very important question of how to define Crohn's disease and administrative claims. So a big group of us led by Dr. Susan Hud flys got together and review this enormous number of papers to find really good published manuscripts that defined Crohn's disease and administrative claims and check the accuracy of these definitions. We read through about 2000 papers and then whittled the list down to 30. We went through and looked at how accurate each way of defining Crohn's was meaning if you say patient had three visits for Crohn's or just one visit how many of those in each group actually had it versus that it was entered by the doctor for billing but the patient didn't actually have it. We found that the most sensitive and specific way to define Crohn's was to have one diagnosis and a medication used to treat Crohn's but that even a very simple definition, like one visit with Crohn's is pretty accurate. Our conclusion for researchers was that a very simple case definition like one diagnosis of Crohn's is fine if they're going to go through a double check that it was accurate. Whereas a more complex definition is best if they're not gonna manually review each patient chart to be sure this research is critical to the future of big data analysis and Crohn's disease because it helps researchers test how accurate their conclusions are when using administrative claims, which should result in more accurate findings to inform doctors about how best to treat their patients. Thanks a lot for your time and again, I'm dr steve miller from johns Hopkins, pediatric Gastroenterology.