Biases in Race and Ethnicity Introduced by Filtering Electronic Health Records for’Complete Data’

Integrated clinical databases from national biobanks have advanced the capacity for disease research. Data quality and completeness filters are used when building clinical cohorts to address limitations of data missingness. However, these filters may unintentionally introduce systemic biases when they are correlated with race and ethnicity. In this study, we examined the race/ethnicity biases introduced by applying common filters to four clinical records databases.

Recommended citation: Acitores Cortina J, Fatapour Y, Brown K, Gisladottir U, Zietz M, Bear Don’t Walk IV O, Peter D, Berkowitz J, Friedrich N, Kivelson S, Kuchi A, Liu H, Srinivasan A, Tsang K, Tatonetti N Biases in Race and Ethnicity Introduced by Filtering Electronic Health Records for “Complete Data”: Observational Clinical Data Analysis JMIR Med Inform 2025;13:e67591 URL: https://medinform.jmir.org/2025/1/e67591 DOI: 10.2196/67591
Read paper | Download paper