
Wei-Qi Wei , MD, PhD, FAMIA
Phenotyping Core at Vanderbilt University Medical Center provides expertise in using electronic health records, including Vanderbilt’s BioVU biobank resource, and techniques like clinical terminologies, natural language processing, and machine learning to better understand response to medications.
The recent widespread adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) provides the opportunity to leverage real-world data generated as a byproduct of healthcare for clinical discovery.
EHRs contain a wealth of valuable information, particularly for pregnant women, women who just gave birth, and for children, as these individuals have scheduled health care visits on a frequent basis which provide a source of longitudinal data. Further, these populations have been previously under-represented in research efforts.
However, the data in EHRs are not always easily accessible for research. Pregnancy and childhood have not been focal points for development of phenotyping methods in EHRs. Algorithms to assess specific drug exposures, important covariates (which may change rapidly), and outcomes (which may be population-specific) have not been validated for obstetric or pediatric populations.
The Phenotyping Support Core will provide full technical support for phenotyping within the proposed Center and other sites of the MRPRINT Hub.