Leveraging Electronic Medical Records to Better Target Suicide Prevention

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the US. Effective suicide prevention interventions exist, but are often resource intensive. Successful identification of those at increased risk for suicide attempt and death makes implementing suicide prevention interventions on a large scale feasible. Electronic medical records (EMRs) contain vast amounts of information on the health care patients have sought and received in real medical settings. In this talk, we will discuss how this rich data source can be used to provide more targeted care, in particular in the area of suicide prevention, as well as some of the challenges of working with EMR data. In particular, we will highlight data that is in commonly available in EMRs and what is not commonly available in EMR data alone. We will discuss the difference between administrative/claims data and EMR data, and give examples where this data is complementary. We will illustrate the potential for using EMR data to advance medicine with the results of a research project that uses data gathered from clinical visits and administrative data to identify individuals at increased risk of suicide in order to better target care.