Development and Application of an Open Tool for Sharing and Analyzing Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Data: an Asthma Use Case (Preprint)

Abstract

The Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Service (ICEES) serves as an open-source, disease-agnostic, regulatory-compliant framework and approach for openly exposing and exploring clinical data that have been integrated at the patient level with a variety of environmental exposures data. ICEES is equipped with tools to support basic statistical exploration of the integrated data in a completely open manner.

This study aims to further develop and apply ICEES as a novel tool for openly exposing and exploring integrated clinical and environmental data. We focus on an asthma use case.

We queried the ICEES open application programming interface using a functionality that supports Chi Square tests between feature variables and a primary outcome measure, with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons (α=.001). We focused on two primary outcomes that are indicative of asthma exacerbations: annual emergency department (ED) or inpatient visits for respiratory issues; and annual prescriptions for prednisone.

Of the N = 157,410 patients within the asthma cohort, N = 26,332 patients (16.1%) had one or more annual emergency department or inpatient visits for respiratory issues, and N = 17,056 patients (10.4%) had one or more annual prescriptions for prednisone. We found that close proximity to a major roadway or highway, exposure to high levels of PM2.5 or ozone, female sex, Caucasian race, low residential density, lack of health insurance, and low household income were significantly associated with asthma exacerbations (P<.001). Asthma exacerbations did not vary by rural vs urban residence. Moreover, the results were largely consistent across outcome measures.

Our results demonstrate that the open-source ICEES can be used to replicate and extend published findings on factors that influence asthma exacerbations. As a disease-agnostic, open-source approach for integrating, exposing, and exploring patient-level clinical and environmental exposures data, we believe that ICEES will have broad adoption by other institutions and application in environmental health and other biomedical fields.