Detection of Diabetes Status and Type in Youth Using Electronic Health Records: The SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth Study.

OBJECTIVE Diabetes surveillance often requires manual medical chart reviews to confirm status and type. This project aimed to create an electronic health record (EHR)-based procedure for improving surveillance efficiency through automation of case identification. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Youth ( RESULTS The sample included 5,308 true cases (89.2% type 1 diabetes). The rule-based algorithm outperformed regression for overall accuracy (0.955 vs 0.936). Type 1 diabetes was classified well by both methods: sensitivity (Se) (>0.95), specificity (Sp) (>0.96), and positive predictive value (PPV) (>0.97). In contrast, the PPVs for type 2 diabetes were 0.642 and 0.778 for the rule-based algorithm and the multinomial regression, respectively. Combination of the rule-based method with chart reviews (n = 695, 7.9%) of persons predicted to have non–type 1 diabetes resulted in perfect PPV for the cases reviewed while increasing overall accuracy (0.983). The Se, Sp, and PPV for type 2 diabetes using the combined method were ≥0.91. CONCLUSIONS An ICD-10 algorithm combined with targeted chart reviews accurately identified diabetes status/type and could be an attractive option for diabetes surveillance in youth.