Residential Mobility in Electronic Health Records
Evaluating longitudinal patient address histories in EHRs as a population-scale source of data on residential mobility, and their implications for spatial health inequity.
methods
funder
Not externally funded
my role
Graduate Research Assistant
principal investigator
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.