ASTERISK: Addiction Services Treatment Evaluation of RISK

This proposal is the first stage of Addiction Services Treatment Evaluation of Risk (ASTERISK), an interdisciplinary project using the electronic health record (EHR) to predict risk and develop tools for stratified care in drug and alcohol addiction treatment. 

This initial project provides a foundation for further research by creating phenotype algorithms that can extract clinically meaningful data from the EHR for patients who have been treated for addiction. The algorithm will be used to identify liver disease risk factors in a cohort of patients with addiction issues using EHR data from a large UK mental healthcare provider. Liver disease will be used as an exemplar to establish the viability of ASTERISK, but the strategy will be applied to other clinical outcomes.

The research findings will form the basis of a grant to expand ASTERISK from identifying risk factors to developing clinical prediction tools. It will use EHR data to develop a prediction model, then investigate its clinical impact and test its validity. The outcome of this larger project will be novel tools for implementing stratified care, embedded in EHR systems.