Article Text
Abstract
Introduction Analyses of large sets of electronic health-related data (Big Data), including local community indicators, may improve knowledge of the outcomes of chronic diseases among patients and healthcare systems. Our study will estimate the prevalence of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and its exacerbations in elderly patients in the Lodz region, Poland; it will also evaluate local community factors potentially associated with disease exacerbations and rank local communities according to health and local community indicators.
Methods and analysis Local community factors, including medical/health, socioeconomic and environmental values potentially associated with COPD exacerbations will be identified. A retrospective analysis of a cohort of about half a million people 65 years old and older, living in local communities of the Lodz region in 2016 will be performed. Relevant data will be extracted from databases, including those of the National Health Fund, Tax Office and National Statistics Centre. This cross-sectional study will include data for a 1 year period, from 1 January until 31 December 2016. The data will first be checked for quality, cleaned and analysed using data mining techniques, and then multilevel logistic regression will be used to discover the community determinants of COPD exacerbations.
Ethics and dissemination The study protocol has been approved by the Bioethical Committee of Medical University of Lodz (RNN/248/18/KE, 10 July 2018). Our findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals and reports.
- elderly
- COPD
- local community
- medical big data
- COPD prevalence
- exacerbations
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors The study concept and design was conceived by MG-C, IZ, KK, AK and JG. Analysis will be performed by IZ (SAS, MLwiN and STATISTICA statistical analyses) and MG-C. MG-C, IZ, KK, AK and JG prepared the first draft of the manuscript. All authors provided edits and critiqued the manuscript for intellectual content.
Funding This article was prepared within the research project no 2016/21/B/NZ7/02052 funded by Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Centre Poland).
Competing interests None declared.
Ethics approval The study protocol has been approved by the Bioethical Committee of Medical University of Lodz (RNN/248/18/KE, 10 July 2018).
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Patient consent for publication Not required.