Semi-automated pipeline to accelerate multi-site flowsheet alignment and concept mapping in electronic health records

Health-care institutions customize electronic health record (EHR) configurations to reflect their unique workflows and patient care priorities. Ensuring EHR alignment across sites facilitates seamless information exchange. We developed a pipeline for EHR flowsheet alignment between health-care organizations. The pipeline is augmented by mapping flowsheet data fields to concepts in the Clinical Care Classification (CCC) nursing terminology.

Flowsheet templates and measures from 2 study sites were transformed into template-measure (T-M) pairs. They were aligned through exact, lexical, or semantic matching. Lexical matches were assessed using Jaccard similarity and fuzzy matching methods. Semantic alignment was determined using cosine similarity between large language model-generated embeddings of T-M pairs and CCC concepts to rank and recommend the top n concepts in CCC. Concept mappings were evaluated based on whether concepts were mapped consistently within the CCC hierarchy.

We totally aligned 31 255 unique T-M pairs in acute care units and 27 012 T-M pairs in intensive care units from 2 study sites. When restricted to the top-ranked CCC concept (n = 1), we achieved a 63% flowsheet alignment rate with a 53% concept mapping rate. Expanding to the top 3 concepts (n = 3) improved alignment to 96.5% and concept mapping to 96%.

Electronic health record data field alignment with concept mapping offers opportunities to standardize data elements presented in flowsheets across health-care sites. We demonstrated the feasibility of leveraging a semi-automated pipeline to streamline the EHR flowsheet alignment and accelerate the manual concept mapping process.