A Method to Improve Availability and Quality of Patient Race Data in an Electronic Health Record System

Although federal regulations mandate documentation of structured race data according to Office of Management and Budget (OMB) categories in electronic health record (EHR) systems, many institutions have reported gaps in EHR race data that hinder secondary use for population-level research focused on underserved populations. When evaluating race data available for research purposes, we found our institution's enterprise EHR contained structured race data for only 51% (1.6 million) of patients.

We seek to improve the availability and quality of structured race data available to researchers by integrating values from multiple local sources.

To address the deficiency in race data availability, we implemented a method to supplement OMB race values from four local sources-inpatient EHR, inpatient billing, natural language processing, and coded clinical observations. We evaluated this method by measuring race data availability and data quality with respect to completeness, concordance, and plausibility.

The supplementation method improved race data availability in the enterprise EHR up to 10% for some minority groups and 4% overall. We identified structured OMB race values for more than 142,000 patients, nearly a third of whom were from racial minority groups. Our data quality evaluation indicated that the supplemented race values improved completeness in the enterprise EHR, originated from sources in agreement with the enterprise EHR, and were unbiased to the enterprise EHR.

Implementation of this method can successfully increase OMB race data availability, potentially enhancing accrual of patients from underserved populations to research studies.