Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-20-2021
Publication Title
Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives
Volume
11
Issue
5
First page number:
653
Last page number:
657
Abstract
Background: Retrospective chart review studies may be delayed by inability to export clean clinical data from an electronic medical record (EMR) or data repository. Macros are pre-programmed procedures that can be used in Microsoft Excel to help streamline the process of cleaning clinical datasets. Objectives: To demonstrate how macros may be useful for researchers at community hospitals and smaller academic health centers that lack informatics support. Methods: Using an intrinsic function of our institution’s EMR, vital signs and lab results from 20 individual hospitalizations were exported to a spreadsheet. Two macros were developed to sort through these datasets and output them into a specified format. The speed of macro-assisted data cleaning was compared to manual transcription. Results: Time spent on data cleaning was significantly reduced when using macro-assisted sorting compared to the manual approach for both vital signs (46.5 seconds versus 12.3 minutes per record, a 94% reduction; P < 0.001) and labs (13.7 seconds versus 2.6 minutes per record, a 91% reduction; P < 0.001). Conclusions: Macros offer a flexible and efficient tool for cleaning large sets of clinical data, particularly when an institution lacks informatics support or EMR functionality to export clinical data in an analysis-ready format.
Keywords
VBA macro; Microsoft excel; Retrospective chart review
Disciplines
Health Services Research | Internal Medicine
File Format
File Size
3118 KB
Language
English
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Repository Citation
Bauzon, J.,
Murphy, C.,
Wahi-Gururaj, S.
(2021).
Using Macros in Microsoft Excel to Facilitate Cleaning of Research Data.
Journal of Community Hospital Internal Medicine Perspectives, 11(5),
653-657.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20009666.2021.1954282