Statistical inference for association studies using electronic health records: handling both selection bias and outcome misclassification

Abstract

Health research using electronic health records (EHR) has gained popularity, but misclassification of EHR-derived disease status and lack of representativeness of the study sample can result in substantial bias in effect estimates and can impact power and type I error. In this paper, we develop new strategies for handling disease status misclassification and selection bias in EHR-based association studies. We first focus on each type of bias separately. For misclassification, we propose three novel likelihood-based bias correction strategies. A distinguishing feature of the EHR setting is that misclassification may be related to patient-varying factors, and the proposed methods leverage data in the EHR to estimate misclassification rates without gold standard labels. For addressing selection bias, we describe how calibration and inverse probability weighting methods from the survey sampling literature can be extended and applied to the EHR setting. Addressing misclassification and selection biases simultaneously is a more challenging problem than dealing with each on its own, and we propose several new strategies. For all methods proposed, we derive valid standard error estimators and provide software for implementation. We provide a new suite of statistical estimation and inference strategies for addressing misclassification and selection bias simultaneously that is tailored to problems arising in EHR data analysis. We apply these methods to data from The Michigan Genomics Initiative, a longitudinal EHR-linked biorepository.