Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jan 21, 2026

Measuring Biophysical and Psychological Stress Levels Following Visitation to Three Locations with Differing Levels of Nature
Published on: June 19, 2019
Disease associations depend on visit type: results from a visit-wide association study
Mary Regina Boland1,2,3,4, Snigdha Alur-Gupta5, Lisa Levine5
11Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology & Informatics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA.
Introduction:
Widespread adoption of Electronic Health Records (EHR) increased the number of reported disease association studies, or Phenome-Wide Association Studies (PheWAS). Traditional PheWAS studies ignore visit type (i.e., department/service conducting the visit). In this study, we investigate the role of visit type on disease association results in the first Visit-Wide Association Study or 'VisitWAS'.
Results:
We studied this visit type effect on association results using EHR data from the University of Pennsylvania. Penn EHR data comes from 1,048 different departments and clinics. We analyzed differences between cancer and obstetrics/gynecologist (Ob/Gyn) visits. Some findings were expected (i.e., increase of neoplasm diagnoses among cancer visits), but others were surprising, including an increase in infectious disease conditions among those visiting the Ob/Gyn.
Conclusion:
We conclude that assessing visit type is important for EHR studies because different medical centers have different visit type distributions. To increase reproducibility among EHR data mining algorithms, we recommend that researchers report visit type in studies.
Related Concept Videos
Genome-wide Association Studies-GWAS
GWAS does not require the identification of the target gene involved in...
Association Areas of the Cortex
Prefrontal Association Area: This area is located in the frontal lobe and is involved in planning, decision-making, and moderating social behavior. It connects with primary motor areas,...
Associative Learning
Classical conditioning, also known...
Somatosensory, Motor, and Association Cortex
Frequency-dependent Selection
Types of Biopharmaceutical Studies: Controlled and Non-Controlled Approaches
Non-controlled studies, commonly employed for initial exploration, lack a control group, rendering them susceptible to biases and external influences. In contrast,...

