Development and Application of an Open Tool for Sharing and Analyzing Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Data: Asthma Use Case

Abstract

Background: The Integrated Clinical and Environmental Exposures Service (ICEES) serves as an open-source, disease-agnostic, regulatory-compliant framework and approach for openly exposing and exploring clinical data that have been integrated at the patient level with a variety of environmental exposures data. ICEES is equipped with tools to support basic statistical exploration of the integrated data in a completely open manner. Objective: This study aims to further develop and apply ICEES as a novel tool for openly exposing and exploring integrated clinical and environmental data. We focus on an asthma use case. Methods: We queried the ICEES open application programming interface (OpenAPI) using a functionality that supports chi-square tests between feature variables and a primary outcome measure, with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons (α=.001). We focused on 2 primary outcomes that are indicative of asthma exacerbations: annual emergency department (ED) or inpatient visits for respiratory issues; and annual prescriptions for prednisone. Results: Of the 157,410 patients within the asthma cohort, 26,332 (16.73%) had 1 or more annual ED or inpatient visits for respiratory issues, and 17,056 (10.84%) had 1 or more annual prescriptions for prednisone. We found that close proximity to a major roadway or highway, exposure to high levels of particulate matter ≤2.5 μm (PM2.5) or ozone, female sex, Caucasian race, low residential density, lack of health insurance, and low household income were significantly associated with asthma exacerbations (P