Aickin, M

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M Aickin

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P02.54. Tools from the SPICER project for doing clinic-based research on integrative medicine and CAM

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BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine

POSTER PRESENTATION Open Access
P02.54. Tools from the SPICER project for doing
clinic-based research on integrative medicine and
CAM
M Aickin
From International Research Congress on Integrative Medicine and Health 2012
Portland, Oregon, USA. 15-18 May 2012
Purpose
Non-intervention research using clinical records is diffi-
cult, both from the theoretical and practical standpoints.
Progress on the former requires progress on the latter.
Several techniques have been developed in the SPICER
project to overcome the various practical problems
encountered in research from electronic medical records
(EMRs). This presentation will exhibit techniques that
have been developed and appear to work well.
Methods
Non-intervention projects on integrative medicine and
pain are underway, one at a large HMO and another in a
mixed conventional/CAM clinic. Both of these projects
have addressed problems of refining research objectives,
performing data extraction, and designing analyses.
Results
In-depth understanding of the EMR system, the clinic,
and how practitioners use the system are necessary to
identify patient samples and available information. A
successful strategy for obtaining research datasets from
EMR has been based on a radical simplification of the
interface between the IT professionals and the analysis
professionals. The post-extraction data manipulation
burden is somewhat high, but must be faced because
conventional data management techniques are infeasible.
The well-known ICD9 and CPT codes can be simplified
in medically appropriate ways, but EMRs often intro-
duce non-standard features into these systems. Medica-
tions present unique problems, but the ACT (anatomic,
therapeutic, chemical) annotation system is very useful
in analysis datasets. Therapeutically relevant analyses
must account for treatment selection bias. A reading list
of resources will be provided.
Conclusion
EMR-based research is potentially an extremely valuable
complement to other methods of medical investigation.
Developing this alternative source of therapeutic knowl-
edge requires dissemination of a toolkit that solves the
practical problems.
Published: 12 June 2012
doi:10.1186/1472-6882-12-S1-P110
Cite this article as: Aickin: P02.54. Tools from the SPICER project for
doing clinic-based research on integrative medicine and CAM. BMC
Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2012 12(Suppl 1):P110.
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University of Arizona, Tucson, USA
Aickin BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine 2012, 12(Suppl 1):P110
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6882/12/S1/P110
© 2012 Aickin; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in
any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.


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P02.54. Tools from the SPICER project for doing clinic-based research on integrative medicine and CAM

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