Shakespeare Electronic Health Records Project

Executive Summary

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finds out about product-related harms from news-media and medical articles, and reports from the public (ie, doctors and patients). Using electronic health records (EHRs) to find harms would be faster. Current strategies to use notes in EHRs to find harm involve coding the concepts in the notes are in slow, intense development, and could miss new types of harms.

Meanwhile, marketers are using new big data methods to find clusters and changes over time to target advertising to internet users. Literary scholars are using word count methods to discuss whether Shakespeare authored all the works attributed to him. This project proposes to try these methods to find harms in EHRs. If the methods work for the test data, we will be able to persuade people to try them on full EHRs. Future real-time use in EHRs will be ideal.

Wide use would improve public health by shortening FDA’s harm detection and response time.

A project supported by the: HHS Ignite Accelerator

Team Members

Roselie Bright (Project Lead), Office of the Commissioner, FDA
Lee Anne Palmer, Center for Veterinary Medicine, FDA
Susan Bright-Ponte, Center for Veterinary Medicine, FDA

Milestones

March 2016: Project selected into the HHS Ignite Accelerator
April 2016: Time in the Accelerator began

Project Sponsor

Taha Kass-Hout, Chief Health Informatics Officer, Office of the Commissioner, FDA