Ground Truth for Medications

[aegis301]

Dear MIMIC Community,

I am wondering if there is a "ground truth" in terms of medications that were actually given to a patient? So far I was using emar for this but now I read that this is based on a newer system and some older entries might not have been included there? mimic_iv.inputevents seems to be lacking information as well since I am missing a lot of medications here which I then wind up to find in mimic_iv.emar. Are there best practices in place?

Kind regards

[alistairewj]

• emar is an excellent ground truth for administration, but, it doesn't exist for half of the patients in the database. Checking if an hadm_id has at least one row in emar is a good way to check if they have data there - and if they do, you're good to go.
• inputevents is manually documented by nurses at the bedside in the ICU. It only pertains to a controlled list of medications (around ~250 or so if I recall). So, if the patient is in the ICU, and the medication is a part of the controlled list, then it is an excellent source of truth. However, you've clearly found a case where the medication isn't included (IV steroids are a good example of a drug that isn't included IIRC)
• There isn't another source of administration in the database - but you can always use prescriptions, which gives intention to treat.