Nrupen Bhavsar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Medicine in the Division of General Internal Medicine, is first author of an original investigation reported in the health informatics section of JAMA Network Open, September 21, 2018. The paper is entitled Value of Neighborhood Socioeconomic Status in Predicting Risk of Outcomes in Studies That Use Electronic Health Record Data.
These researchers looked at answering the question "what is the added predictive value of neighborhood socioeconomic status when predicting health outcomes and use of health care services with data from the electronic health record?" Dr. Bhavsar's tweet may have summarized it best:
"Does information about a person's neighborhood improve prediction of their health outcomes when using EHR data? Short answer: it depends."-Nrupen Bhavsar (@Nrupen)
Findings
The predictive value of neighborhood socioeconomic status varied by outcome of interest. When added to electronic health record variables, neighborhood socioeconomic status did not improve predictive performance for any outcome. These results suggest that information about the neighborhood in which a person lives may not contribute much more to risk prediction than information already within electronic health record data. This is relevant to those doing population risk assessment. The EHR data alone may suffice.