%0 Journal Article
%T Challenges with Collecting Smoking Status in Electronic Health Records
%A David A. Albert
%A David K. Vawdrey
%A Fernanda Polubriaginof
%A Hojjat Salmasian
%J Archive of "AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings".
%D 2017
%X Smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the United States. Obtaining patients¡¯ smoking status is the first step in delivering smoking cessation counseling. In this study, we assessed the quality of smoking status captured in an electronic health record from a large academic medical center. We analyzed data from structured notes, finding that smoking status was documented in 98% of 64,451 hospital encounters in 2016. 32% hospital encounters had discrepant documentation, and 54.5% of patients had implausible changes (e.g., changes from ¡°current smoker¡± to ¡°never smoker¡±). Overall, only 2.9% of patients were documented as active smokers, but 36.4% were documented as ¡°unknown¡± or had discrepancies in their smoking status. These results suggest that patients that smoke are not appropriately identified. Centralized documentation with clinically actionable smoking status categories and implementation of patient-facing tools that allow patients to directly record their information could improve data quality of smoking status
%U https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5977725/