Residential Mobility in Electronic Health Records

Using longitudinal patient address histories in EHRs as a population-scale measure of residential mobility, and what it reveals about spatial health inequity.

Health systems collect patient addresses as a routine byproduct of clinical care, updating them at every visit. In collaboration with Barbara Entwisle at the Carolina Population Center, this project asks what that administrative record can tell us about how people actually move.

Two papers are in preparation. The first examines the stability and instability of patient address records across a large clinical population over time, characterizing what address changes in EHR data represent and under what conditions they proxy true residential moves. The second evaluates EHR-derived address histories as a new source of data on residential mobility, benchmarking them against traditional survey-based approaches. Both are targeted for Demography. This work was presented at the Population Association of America Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2025).

Selected Outputs

Presentations

Bhatia, A., Entwisle, B. “Patient Addresses in Electronic Health Records: New Source of Data on Spatial Mobility?” Population Association of America Annual Meeting, Washington, DC. (2025)
“Patient Addresses in Electronic Health Records: New Source of Data on Spatial Mobility?” Migration Working Group, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC. (2026)