Trajectories: a framework for detecting temporal clinical event sequences from health data standardized to the...

To develop a framework for identifying temporal clinical event trajectories from Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership-formatted observational healthcare data.

A 4-step framework based on significant temporal event pair detection is described and implemented as an open-source R package. It is used on a population-based Estonian dataset to first replicate a large Danish population-based study and second, to conduct a disease trajectory detection study for type 2 diabetes patients in the Estonian and Dutch databases as an example.

As a proof of concept, we apply the methods in the Estonian database and provide a detailed breakdown of our findings. All Estonian population-based event pairs are shown. We compare the event pairs identified from Estonia to Danish and Dutch data and discuss the causes of the differences. The overlap in the results was only 2.4%, which highlights the need for running similar studies in different populations.

For the first time, there is a complete software package for detecting disease trajectories in health data.