Identifying Family Relationships from Electronic Health Records: A Machine Learning Approach

To develop and evaluate machine learning methods for automated identification of family relationships from electronic health records (EHRs). We employed Random Forest classifiers to identify five relationship types: Mother-Child, Father-Child, Sibling-Sibling, Twin-Twin, and Partner-Partner, using a four-stage iterative refinement process to improve precision for patient-centered outcomes research (PCOR) and healthcare applications.

We used two large-scale Indiana datasets: the Indiana Network for Patient Care (INPC), comprising approximately 15 million unique individuals across approximately 45 million medical records, and the Indiana Natality dataset (birth certificates, 1970-2024), which served as the gold standard. Positive cases were derived by linking verified relationships from Natality records to INPC using a shared Global Identifier. Negative cases were drawn from a three-tier blocking strategy combined with sliding window restriction and similarity scoring, which together reduced the comparison space from over 10 ¹⁴ potential pairs to approximately 121 million candidates. Five Random Forest classifiers underwent four-stage iterative refinement: initial training, feature removal for multicollinearity, feature engineering to address systematic errors, and training-data refinement restricted to relationship pairs with at least one shared contact feature.

The models achieved precision of 0.92 to 1.00, recall of 0.97 to 1.00, and F1 scores of 0.94 to 1.00 across all relationship types (Mother-Child 0.97, Father-Child 0.98, Sibling-Sibling 0.98, Twin-Twin 1.00, Partner-Partner 0.94). Between 15% and 78% of Natality-verified relationships lacked any shared contact information in INPC and were structurally undetectable by record linkage; restricting training and evaluation to linkable pairs improved precision, and training-data refinement improved F1-scores by a further 0.02-0.04 for the Mother-Child, Father-Child, and Sibling models. High-confidence predictions (probability ≥ 0.9) captured 77-99% of true positives. Age difference was the primary predictor for parent-child and twin relationships, while phone number similarity was most important for siblings.

The framework identifies family relationships from standard demographic fields available in most EHR systems. The iterative refinement approach shows how systematic error analysis can guide methodological improvements. Training-data refinement addresses a constraint in EHR-based family linkage: not all verified biological relationships have overlapping demographic footprints in healthcare data. Unlike rule-based approaches, the framework provides probability scores that enable configurable deployment thresholds.

The Random Forest models demonstrate high performance suitable for large-scale research deployment and are ready for testing in clinical applications rather than immediate widespread clinical use. The methodology can be adapted to other EHR systems, supporting family-centered study design in patient-centered outcomes research.