Quality improvement and practice-based research in sleep medicine using structured clinical documentation in the electronic medical record

Poor Sleep Quality and Associated Factors among People Living with HIV/AIDS Attending ART Clinic at Tirunesh Beijing Hospital, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Background

Sleep is a universal need of all higher life forms, including humans. However, sleep problems are one of the most common problems raised by patients living with human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV/AIDS). Poor sleep quality is one of the hidden and unrecognized factors contributing to poor medication adherence and functional inactivity among people living with human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome.

Methods

A hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted from April 15, 2022, to May 30, 2022, at an antiretroviral therapy (ART) clinic of Tirunesh Beijing Hospital. A systematic sampling technique was used to select study participants. A total of 413 people who are living with human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome were enrolled in the study. Data were collected through interviews when study participants finished their visit. Variables whose P value was less than 0.2 in bivariable logistic regression were entered into multivariable binary logistic regression to identify factors associated with poor sleep quality.

Result

The level of poor sleep quality among people living with HIV/AIDS was 73.7%. People living with HIV/AIDS who had poor sleep hygiene were 2.5 times more likely to have poor sleep quality compared with those patients who had good sleep hygiene. Moreover, study participants who had anxiety were three times more likely to have poor sleep quality compared with those who did not have anxiety (AOR: 3.09; 95% CI = 1.61-5.89). Study participants who had chronic diseases in addition to HIV/AIDS were 3 times more likely to have poor sleep quality compared with those who do not have it (AOR: 2.99; 95% CI = 1.15-7.79). Additionally, people living with HIV/AIDS who were stigmatized due to their disease were 2.5 times more likely to have poor sleep quality compared with their counterparts (AOR = 2.49; 95% CI = 1.43-4.21).

Conclusion

In this study, the magnitude of poor sleep quality among people living with HIV/AIDS was high. Being a farmer, being a merchant, having chronic diseases, having anxiety, having a CD4 count of 200-499 cells/mm³, being stigmatized, and having poor sleep hygiene were factors that had an association with poor sleep quality. Healthcare providers should screen people living with HIV/AIDS for anxiety and encourage them to practice good sleep hygiene during follow-up.

Assessing the Contribution of Scanned Outside Documents to the Completeness of Real-World Data Abstraction

PURPOSE

Electronic health record (EHR) data are widely used in precision medicine, quality improvement, disease surveillance, and population health management. However, a significant amount of EHR data are stored in unstructured formats including scanned documents external to the treatment facility presenting an informatics challenge for secondary use. Studies are needed to characterize the clinical information uniquely available in scanned outside documents (SODs) to understand to what extent the availability of such information affects the use of these real-world data for cancer research.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Two independent EHR data abstractions capturing 30 variables commonly used in oncology research were conducted for 125 patients treated for advanced non-small-cell lung cancer at a comprehensive cancer center, with and without consideration of SODs. Completeness and concordance were compared between the two abstractions, overall, and by patient groups and variable types.

RESULTS

The overall completeness of the data with SODs was 77.6% as compared with 54.3% for the abstraction without SODs. The differences in completeness were driven by data related to biomarker tests, which were more likely to be uniquely available in SODs. Such data were prone to missingness among patients who were diagnosed externally.

CONCLUSION

There were no major differences in completeness between the two abstractions by demographics, diagnosis, disease progression, performance status, or oral therapy use. However, biomarker data were more likely to be uniquely contained in the SODs. Our findings may help cancer centers prioritize the types of SOD data being abstracted for research or other secondary purposes.

Sleep and circadian informatics data harmonization: a workshop report from the Sleep Research Society and Sleep Research Network

The increasing availability and complexity of sleep and circadian data are equally exciting and challenging. The field is in constant technological development, generating better high-resolution physiological and molecular data than ever before. Yet, the promise of large-scale studies leveraging millions of patients is limited by suboptimal approaches for data sharing and interoperability. As a result, integration of valuable clinical and basic resources is problematic, preventing knowledge discovery and rapid translation of findings into clinical care. To understand the current data landscape in the sleep and circadian domains, the Sleep Research Society (SRS) and the Sleep Research Network (now a task force of the SRS) organized a workshop on informatics and data harmonization, presented at the World Sleep Congress 2019, in Vancouver, Canada. Experts in translational informatics gathered with sleep research experts to discuss opportunities and challenges in defining strategies for data harmonization. The goal of this workshop was to fuel discussion and foster innovative approaches for data integration and development of informatics infrastructure supporting multi-site collaboration. Key recommendations included collecting and storing findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable data; identifying existing international cohorts and resources supporting research in sleep and circadian biology; and defining the most relevant sleep data elements and associated metadata that could be supported by early integration initiatives. This report introduces foundational concepts with the goal of facilitating engagement between the sleep/circadian and informatics communities and is a call to action for the implementation and adoption of data harmonization strategies in this domain.