Flaws of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Studies
September 23, 2026 by substack.com
Flaws of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) Studies
Electronic medical records can look objective while still giving researchers a distorted view of behaviour. Smoking status, vaping history, dual use and switching are often recorded incompletely or reduced to crude categories that miss the timing and direction of change. For nicotine research, those gaps matter because the difference between “ever used” and “switched away from cigarettes” can alter the entire interpretation of risk. Better data means better science — and better science means better policy.
