Critical carE Database for Advanced Research (CEDAR): An automated method to support intensive care units with electronic health record data

Abstract

Patients treated in an intensive care unit (ICU) are critically ill and require life-sustaining organ failure support. Existing critical care data resources are limited to a select number of institutions, contain only ICU data, and do not enable the study of local changes in care patterns. To address these limitations, we developed the Critical carE Database for Advanced Research (CEDAR), a method for automating extraction and transformation of data from an electronic health record (EHR) system. Compared to an existing gold standard of manually collected data at our institution, CEDAR was statistically similar in most measures, including patient demographics and sepsis-related organ failure assessment (SOFA) scores. Additionally, CEDAR automated data extraction obviated the need for manual collection of 550 variables. Critically, during the spring 2020 COVID-19 surge in New York City, a modified version of CEDAR supported pandemic response efforts, including clinical operations and research. Other academic medical centers may find value in using the CEDAR method to automate data extraction from EHR systems to support ICU activities.