EMERSE (Electronic Medical Record Search Engine) is software that helps researchers accurately find and extract important patient details like diagnoses, medications, procedures, and complications from clinical notes. EMERSE is easy for non-technical people to use and enables health research that was previously inefficient or nearly impossible. The functionality enables users to quickly and easily search notes in Epic (similar to a Google search) and retrieve data (terms are highlighted within the notes for rapid concept identification) that are not otherwise available in structured fields, such as ICD codes and lab values. EMERSE has the potential to save study personnel hours on chart review for data collection.
EMERSE cohorts can be created in Epic and exported to REDCap via the REDCap on FHIR interface.
EMERSE use cases:
- Feasibility study/Preparatory to research – estimate counts of patients meeting eligibility criteria
- Rare diseases – quickly find mentions of rare diseases, especially helpful when diagnosis codes are too broad or used incorrectly.
- Eligibility determination – Quickly evaluate complicated eligibility criteria to check free text documents for mentions of specific criteria
- Data abstraction – For research subjects, treatment courses, side effects, etc. can be abstracted with ease
- Quality improvement
- Risk Management – rapidly identify patients with device/implant recalls
- Clinical chart review as a part of patient care (e.g., searching chart to locate a medication taken multiple years ago for a specific condition)
For more details about EMERSE, please visit https://project-emerse.org/
For the EMERSE user guide, please visit https://project-emerse.org/documentation/user_guide.html
For OUHSC User Support (to start an EMERSE project or to ask questions about EMERSE):
Contact the REDCap Admin Team: william-beasley@ouhsc.edu and thomas-wilson@ouhsc.edu