Objectives: To address the need for interactive visualization tools and databases in characterizing multimorbidity patterns across different populations, we developed the Phenome-wide Multi-Institutional Multimorbidity Explorer (PheMIME). This tool leverages three large-scale EHR systems to facilitate efficient analysis and visualization of disease multimorbidity, aiming to reveal both robust and novel disease associations that are consistent across different systems and to provide insight for enhancing personalized healthcare strategies.
Materials and methods: PheMIME integrates summary statistics from phenome-wide analyses of disease multimorbidities, utilizing data from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, Mass General Brigham, and the UK Biobank. It offers interactive and multifaceted visualizations for exploring multimorbidity. Incorporating an enhanced version of associationSubgraphs, PheMIME also enables dynamic analysis and inference of disease clusters, promoting the discovery of complex multimorbidity patterns. A case study on schizophrenia demonstrates its capability for generating interactive visualizations of multimorbidity networks within and across multiple systems. Additionally, PheMIME supports diverse multimorbidity-based discoveries, detailed further in online case studies.
Results: The PheMIME is accessible at https://prod.tbilab.org/PheMIME/. A comprehensive tutorial and multiple case studies for demonstration are available at https://prod.tbilab.org/PheMIME_supplementary_materials/. The source code can be downloaded from https://github.com/tbilab/PheMIME.
Discussion: PheMIME represents a significant advancement in medical informatics, offering an efficient solution for accessing, analyzing, and interpreting the complex and noisy real-world patient data in electronic health records.
Conclusion: PheMIME provides an extensive multimorbidity knowledge base that consolidates data from three EHR systems, and it is a novel interactive tool designed to analyze and visualize multimorbidities across multiple EHR datasets. It stands out as the first of its kind to offer extensive multimorbidity knowledge integration with substantial support for efficient online analysis and interactive visualization.
Keywords: PheWAS; UK Biobank; electronic health records (EHRs); interactive network analysis; interoperability and reproducibility; multimorbidity.
© The Author(s) 2024. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Medical Informatics Association.