Stressful Life Events in Electronic Health Records: a Scoping Review

Overview

Journal J Am Med Inform Assoc

Publisher Oxford University Press

Specialty Medical Informatics

Date 2024 Feb 13

PMID 38349862

Authors

Dmitry Scherbakov

Abolfazl Mollalo

Leslie Lenert

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Objectives: Stressful life events, such as going through divorce, can have an important impact on human health. However, there are challenges in capturing these events in electronic health records (EHR). We conducted a scoping review aimed to answer 2 major questions: how stressful life events are documented in EHR and how they are utilized in research and clinical care.

Materials And Methods: Three online databases (EBSCOhost platform, PubMed, and Scopus) were searched to identify papers that included information on stressful life events in EHR; paper titles and abstracts were reviewed for relevance by 2 independent reviewers.

Results: Five hundred fifty-seven unique papers were retrieved, and of these 70 were eligible for data extraction. Most articles (n = 36, 51.4%) were focused on the statistical association between one or several stressful life events and health outcomes, followed by clinical utility (n = 15, 21.4%), extraction of events from free-text notes (n = 12, 17.1%), discussing privacy and other issues of storing life events (n = 5, 7.1%), and new EHR features related to life events (n = 4, 5.7%). The most frequently mentioned stressful life events in the publications were child abuse/neglect, arrest/legal issues, and divorce/relationship breakup. Almost half of the papers (n = 7, 46.7%) that analyzed clinical utility of stressful events were focused on decision support systems for child abuse, while others (n = 7, 46.7%) were discussing interventions related to social determinants of health in general.

Discussion And Conclusions: Few citations are available on the prevalence and use of stressful life events in EHR reflecting challenges in screening and storing of stressful life events.

Citing Articles

Using large language models for extracting stressful life events to assess their impact on preventive colon cancer screening adherence.

Scherbakov D, Heider P, Wehbe R, Alekseyenko A, Lenert L, Obeid J BMC Public Health. 2025; 25(1):12.

PMID: 39748338 PMC: 11697464. DOI: 10.1186/s12889-024-21123-2.

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