Principal Investigator: Nadia Penrod PhD
Department: Biostatistics Epidemiology & Informatics
Services Provided: Data Wrangling, Publication Support
Publication: NM Penrod, SF Lynch, S Thomas, N Seshadri, JH Moore. Prevalence and characterization of yoga mentions in the electronic health record. March 2019. (Submitted)
Description:
There is a growing patient population using yoga as a therapeutic intervention, but little is known about how yoga actually interfaces with healthcare in a clinical setting. We collaborated with Dr. Nadia Penrod to perform a retrospective observational cohort study using electronic health records from throughout the Penn Medicine health system. Through text-mining and natural language processing, we identified clinical chart notes that mention the word yoga and looked at how these notes were distributed among patients, clinicians, and clinical service departments over a ten year period. To assign a context to yoga notes, we built a text-based classifier to separate the yoga notes into three classes: clinician recommendation, documentation of patient practice, and other. We found widespread and growing documentation of yoga in the clinical charts notes. And we identified nine medical conditions for which clinicians recommend the use of yoga as treatment including: Parkinson’s disease, anxiety, depression, pregnancy, and backache. Work is ongoing to link yoga practice with health outcomes.
