CTN-0081: Emergency Medicine Opioid Data Infrastructure: Key Venue to Address Opioid Morbidity and Mortality

November 8, 2021 /

Arjun Krishna Venkatesh, MD, MBA, MHS
Lead Investigator
Associate Professor
Yale School of Medicine
arjun.venkatesh@yale.edu

Kathryn Hawk, MD, MHS
Co-Lead Investigator
Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine
Yale School of Medicine
kathryn.hawk@yale.edu

Richard Andrew Taylor, MD, MHS
Co-Lead Investigator
Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine and Biostatistics (Health Informatics)
Yale School of Medicine
Richard.taylor@yale.edu 

The goal of the project is to build clinical data research infrastructure that will begin to enhance capacity to use electronic health record (EHR) data and patient-reported outcomes measures (PROs) to conduct pain and opioid related research in Emergency Departments (EDs). Existing and potential common data elements (CDE) in emergency medicine settings relevant to opioid misuse and use disorders will be identified. Validity and feasibility testing will be conducted to compare opioid relevant CDEs electronically extracted from participating EDs by the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP) Clinical Emergency Data Registry (CEDR) to assess how consistently data elements are obtained in CEDR, the degree to which data elements are captured with a standard format, and whether data elements are easily mapped from various EHR systems to the CEDR. The feasibility and acceptability of electronically collecting patient reported outcome measures via patient portals will be examined.

NOTE: This project is supported in a collaboration with the DHHS Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation using resources from the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Trust Fund (Interagency Agreement #ASPE-2018-001).

Primary Findings

This research found substantial fragmentation in the design and construction of opioid use disorder (OUD) related CDEs and little OUD specific CDEs in existing data dictionaries, systems and literature. Given the significant gaps in data collection and reporting, future work should leverage existing structured data elements to create standard workflow processes to improve OUD data capture in EHR systems.

Primary Outcomes Article: Venkatesh A, et al. Assessing the Readiness of Digital Data Infrastructure for Opioid Use Disorder Research. Addiction Science & Clinical Practice 2020;15:24. [get article]

    Node Involvement

    Lead Node(s):

  • New England Consortium Node

    • All Participating Nodes:

  • New England Consortium Node