These limitations, however, are balanced by strengths: the unusual, highly heterogeneous population, data extraction from computerised records augmented with manual abstraction for quality control, and a consistent, single-institution approach to pathological diagnosis and patient care.
There was complete agreement between the computer and manual abstraction for the total number of potentially inappropriate prescriptions detected.
Information providers have built businesses around the manual abstraction of unstructured data from the literature by human domain experts.
We used a manual abstraction of respiratory symptoms from the EMR as a reference standard to uncover cases of ARI.
Validation of case/control status was conducted at each site through manual abstraction of random samples of patient charts.
Information from this manual abstraction was used to improve the positive predictive value of the electronic algorithm.
Until recently, most research that included information from the unstructured EHR fields utilized manual abstraction, a time-consuming and error-fraught process.
Additional programming work, such as Natural Language Processing, may help improve data collection timeliness and efficiency by automatically interpreting text from electronic medical records, thus reducing the need for manual abstraction.
Both Kerr et al. [ 21] and Parsons et al. [ 22] found that EMR-derived measures can underestimate performance in comparison to manual abstraction.
The written report of the patient care encounter as filed by the EMS crew following the resuscitation was also used in the manual abstraction process.
Statistical analyses to determine the correlation between data obtained using the automated and manual abstraction methods were conducted using STATA version 10.1 (College Station, TX).
