Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Medical Informatics
Date Submitted: Jan 5, 2023
Open Peer Review Period: Jan 5, 2023 - Mar 2, 2023
Date Accepted: Jun 1, 2023
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Establishment of a public mental health records registry in the Ferrara province: adaptation of a 30-year-long clinical database for research purposes
ABSTRACT
Background:
The immediate use for research of data exported from Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is often limited by the necessity to transform data elements into an actual dataset.
Objective:
This paper describes the methodology to establish a dataset originated from an EHR registry that included clinical, health service and socio-demographic information.
Methods:
An Extract, Transform, Load process was applied to raw data collected at the Integrated Department of Mental Health and Pathological Addictions in Ferrara, Italy, from 1925 to February 18, 2021, to build the new anonymized FErrara-PSYchiatry (FEPSY) database. Information collected before the first EHR was implemented in 1991 were excluded. An unsupervised cluster analysis was performed to identify patients’ subgroups to support proof-of-concept.
Results:
FEPSY included 3,861,432 records on 46,222 patients. Since 1991, each year, a median of 1,404 (range 226-2,687) patients had newly accessed care and a median of 7,300 were actively receiving care. Among 38,022 patients with a mental disorder, two clusters were identified: one predominantly male, aged 25-34 at first presentation, living with their parents, and the second predominantly female, aged 35-44, living with their own family.
Conclusions:
The process to build FEPSY proved to be robust and replicable with similar healthcare data, even when they were not originally conceived for research purposes. FEPSY will enable future in-depth analyses regarding the epidemiology and social determinants of mental disorders, access to mental healthcare, and resource utilization. Clinical Trial: N/A
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