TY - JOUR T1 - Identifying COPD in routinely collected electronic health records: a systematic scoping review JF - ERJ Open Research JO - erjor DO - 10.1183/23120541.00167-2021 SP - 00167-2021 AU - Shanya Sivakumaran AU - Mohammad A. Alsallakh AU - Ronan A. Lyons AU - Jennifer K. Quint AU - Gwyneth A. Davies Y1 - 2021/01/01 UR - http://openres.ersjournals.com/content/early/2021/07/01/23120541.00167-2021.abstract N2 - Although routinely collected electronic health records (EHR) are widely used to examine outcomes related to chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), consensus regarding the identification of cases from electronic healthcare databases is lacking. We systematically examine and summarise approaches from the recent literature.MEDLINE via EBSCOhost was searched for COPD-related studies using EHR published from January 1, 2018 to November 30, 2019. Data were extracted relating to the case definition of COPD and determination of COPD severity and phenotypes.From 185 eligible studies, we found widespread variation in the definitions used to identify people with COPD in terms of code sets used (with 20 different code sets in use based on the ICD-10 classification alone) and requirement of additional criteria (relating to age (n=139), medication (n=31), multiplicity of events (n=21), spirometry (n=19) and smoking status (n=9)). Only 7 studies used a case definition which had been validated against a reference standard in the same dataset. Various proxies of disease severity were used since spirometry results and patient-reported outcomes were not often available.To enable the research community to draw reliable insights from electronic health records and aid comparability between studies, clear reporting and greater consistency of the definitions used to identify COPD and related outcome measures is key.FootnotesThis manuscript has recently been accepted for publication in the ERJ Open Research. It is published here in its accepted form prior to copyediting and typesetting by our production team. After these production processes are complete and the authors have approved the resulting proofs, the article will move to the latest issue of the ERJOR online. Please open or download the PDF to view this article.Conflict of interest: Shanya Sivakumaran has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Mohammad Alsallakh has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Ronan Lyons reports payment to Swansea University to support research using population health datasets from Health Data Research UK (HDRUK), outside the submitted work.Conflict of interest: Jennifer Quint has nothing to disclose.Conflict of interest: Gwyneth Davies has nothing to disclose. ER -