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Codelist workshops

A three hour, hands-on workshop on building, reusing and documenting codelists for research with electronic health records. I run it for MSc and PhD cohorts, research groups and industry teams.

Decorative background
Codelist workshops

At a Glance

3 hours

A single session with a 20 minute break halfway through.

Up to 30 people

The room should allow group work in groups of 4 to 6 people.

30 minutes of pre-reading

Sent in advance, with a further 30 minutes of optional reading for afterwards.

Lectures and group work

Short lectures of 10 to 20 minutes with group exercises in between.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the session, participants should be able to:

  1. Define what a codelist is.
  2. Describe how clinical encounters are transformed into coded data within electronic health records.
  3. Construct a codelist for a specified clinical condition using systematic search strategies.
  4. Apply inclusion and exclusion criteria to refine a codelist for a defined research question.
  5. Document codelist development decisions with sufficient detail for reproducibility.

What We Cover

We work through one scenario for the whole session, which is building the codelists for an epidemiology study framed around a single research question. Each exercise takes one of the codelists that the study needs and uses a different approach to create it.
Do Type 2 diabetics receive more oral antibiotics for their coughs than non-diabetics?

Why health data needs codelists

How a consultation becomes coded data in an electronic health record, and why that means we need codelists to find patients.

Which codelists a study needs

Working out the codelists required for the population, exposure and outcome when we design a study.

A new codelist from scratch

Writing inclusion and exclusion criteria and then searching for codes systematically.

Reusing an existing codelist

How to find and adapt a codelist that someone else has made, the pros and cons, and what to look out for.

Useful tools

Existing tools for managing, sharing and comparing codelists.

Documenting for reproducibility

Recording the decisions behind a codelist so that someone else can understand and repeat them.

What I provide

I provide slides, worksheets, reading material and references, all of which can be distributed to participants. For a flavour of the material, I have written two blog posts that cover similar ground: What is a Codelist? and How to Create a Codelist.

Where I have run it

I have delivered this workshop at the University of Glasgow and Queen Mary University of London. The format described here is the one I ran there, and I am happy to modify it to suit your course or team.

Book a Workshop

Workshops are delivered through my company, Parakeet Consulting. Get in touch with your audience, group size and preferred dates and I will come back to you with a proposal.