Developing a COVID-19 WHO Clinical Progression Scale inpatient database from electronic health record data

• Main Authors: Blumberg, S. (Author), Gong, J.J (Author), Liu, X. (Author), McDonald, S.A (Author), Medford, R.J (Author), Ramaswamy, P. (Author), Saleh, S.N (Author)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: NLM (Medline) 2022
• Subjects: COVID-19; Databases, Factual; electronic health record; electronic health records; Electronic Health Records; factual database; hospital patient; human; Humans; Inpatients; medical informatics; public health informatics; World Health Organization
• Online Access: View Fulltext in Publisher

 OBJECTIVE: There is a need for a systematic method to implement the World Health Organization's Clinical Progression Scale (WHO-CPS), an ordinal clinical severity score for coronavirus disease 2019 patients, to electronic health record (EHR) data. We discuss our process of developing guiding principles mapping EHR data to WHO-CPS scores across multiple institutions. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Using WHO-CPS as a guideline, we developed the technical blueprint to map EHR data to ordinal clinical severity scores. We applied our approach to data from 2 medical centers. RESULTS: Our method was able to classify clinical severity for 100% of patient days for 2756 patient encounters across 2 institutions. DISCUSSION: Implementing new clinical scales can be challenging; strong understanding of health system data architecture was integral to meet the clinical intentions of the WHO-CPS. CONCLUSION: We describe a detailed blueprint for how to apply the WHO-CPS scale to patient data from the EHR. © The Author(s) 2022. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: [e-mail].