Developing and testing search strategies to identify patients with active seasonal allergic rhinitis in general...

We sought to assess the accuracy of different search terms to identify individuals with active seasonal allergic rhinitis (SAR) in general practice.

A reference search strategy was developed to identify patients with active SAR. This was applied through inspection of electronic health records of patients aged 15-45 years in a 10% random sample of a general practice database. Searches used Read codes and medication relating to SAR. Sensitivity, specificity, and positive and negative predictive values were calculated.

Using the reference search strategy, 54/1092 (4.9%) of 15-45 year-old patients had current SAR. Searching for drugs used in nasal allergy had the highest sensitivity (85%) and good specificity (86%). Searching for a recorded history of SAR (H170) in the last two years was more specific (100%) but this approach only had limited sensitivity (17%).

Electronic searches can be used to identify patients with current SAR, but the accuracy varies widely. Larger numbers of sufferers can be identified using broader search parameters, but with increasing numbers of false positives. In contrast, more focused search strategies give a smaller yield needing less cleaning of data to identify true positives, but there is an associated increase in the number of false negatives.