Residential Mobility in Electronic Health Records

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 examines whether these administrative records can serve as a measure of residential mobility.

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)