Dr. Campbell wins CTSI award
Congratulations to Dr. Campbell who has won a CTSI Integrated Pilot Grant Award for his project, “Validity, acceptability, and utility of electronic health record household linking”.
Strategies to link household members in the electronic health record (EHR) offer novel opportunities to manage illnesses within the household sphere. Health information technology has been developed to link household members in EHRs for research applications, and for maternal-neonatal clinical care. However, questions of validity of EHR-generated household links, acceptability of linkage-based clinical tools, and utility of links to generate clinically actionable data, have impeded scaling of this technology to clinical applications beyond the neonatal period. Here, we propose a mixed methods project to examine the validity, acceptability, and utility of EHR-based household links to address diagnostic gaps for one of the most prevalent long-term infectious diseases affecting BMC’s patients: latent tuberculosis (TB) infection. First, we will enroll adult and pediatric patients from BMC’s TB clinic to validate EHR-based household membership using self-reported household member lists. Second, we will conduct a qualitative study to gauge acceptability of a plausible TB-focused clinical tool that uses EHR household links. Third, we will leverage a retrospective study of TB infection care access among BMC’s patients to evaluate the utility of household linkage data to reveal household TB testing gaps. Our study will generate insights that are vital to translate this novel technology to the clinical sphere, both for patients at risk of TB infection, and for the broader research and clinical community.
Collaborators include: Dr. Karen Jacobson (BU/BMC), Dr. Jessica Haberer (MGH) – co-I, Dr. Bob Horsburgh – co-I, Dr. Heather Hsu (BMC) – co-I, Dr. Helen Jenkins (BMC) – co-I, Dr. Vishakha Sabharwal (BMC) – co-I. Dr. Campbell is eager to include more collaborators as the project progresses!