Automatic identification of type 2 diabetes, hypertension, ischaemic heart disease, heart failure and their levels of severity from Italian General Practitioners' electronic medical records: a validation study

Abstract

The Italian project MATRICE aimed to assess how well cases of type 2 diabetes (T2DM), hypertension, ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and heart failure (HF) and their levels of severity can be automatically extracted from the Health Search/CSD Longitudinal Patient Database (HSD). From the medical records of the general practitioners (GP) who volunteered to participate, cases were extracted by algorithms based on diagnosis codes, keywords, drug prescriptions and results of diagnostic tests. A random sample of identified cases was validated by interviewing their GPs.