The Department of Biostatistics is excited to provide for you linkage between our clinical and administrative records and the ​Social Secuity Death Master File released by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Previously, we only had record that a patient was deceased based upon follow up at KUH/UKP or if they died while cared for at KUH/UKP (23,850 patients indicated as "Deceased" within the "Demographics" ontology). Now we have an additional indicator that the patient has died based upon records reported to the federal government (177,706 patients indicated as "Deceased per SSA" within the "Demographics" ontology).

Note, we currently are matching patients based upon an exact match of their social security number AND their date of birth.

We think this will be a powerful addition which will allow preliminary hypotheses generation regarding mortality rates between different patient cohorts. In the future we might hope to provide analysis plugins that calculate routine survival analysis.

For a neurlogical example: HERON has 1356 patients who've ever been diagnosed with Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS aka Lou Gehrig's disease) at KUMC since 2000. Of those, the hospital knew 206 had died. Now that we can also check the social security administration, we know that 821 have died.

This month, the release of our HERON research data repository honors Cheney Lake. In addition to our regularly monthly refresh of the data, we're excited about the three big enhancements in this release:

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Unfortunately, we broke something so we know longer know race regarding our population (#637). That data was suspect so we will be exploring how to incorporate race and ethnicity with greater fidelity.

Join us at the Frontiers Clinical/Translational Informatics Clinic for full demonstration and discussion. The next one is Tuesday, Oct 4 at 4pm in 1040 Dykes Library.

Meanwhile, see:

• Using i2b2 Timeline and other analysis plug-ins in HERON
• Social Security Death Index integration expands vital statistics available in HERON

Contents Summary: 50% more Labs

The HERON repository contains approximately 516 million real observations from the hospital and clinics:

We have loaded was was referred to in O2/Epic as "conversion labs". These were lab results recorded prior to Epic system implementation from 2004 through 2007. Note that because we shift dates back in time (0 to 365 days) for de-identifcation, some of these results in HERON are noted as resulted in 2003. The table below provides a comparison of laboratory results by year for our current Cheney release versus last month's release

Beta Disclaimer

We are providing this early access to obtain feedback from you, the research community. While we are actively working on validating the data loaded into the system with hospital and clinic technical staff, there may be problems with our translation of data from our source systems (HospitalEpicSource and ClinicIdxSource) into HERON. Please email us at heron-admin@kumc.edu if you discover information you believe may be erroneous. We are actively working on enhancing the types of data included. Stay tuned to our roadmap to track progress toward upcoming releases.

Various Issues Still Apply

Keep in mind the issues noted in the original HERON beta notice, including:

• date shifting, part of our DeIdentificationStrategy
• age searching (#158)

Problems/Defects/Issues Addressed in this Release

no major issues.

Outstanding Problems/Defects/Issues

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