Healthcare utilization is a collider: an introduction to collider bias in EHR data reuse.
Nicole G WeiskopfDavid Andrew DorrChristie JacksonHarold P LehmannCaroline A ThompsonPublished in: Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association : JAMIA (2023)
We focus specifically on problems that may arise from conditioning on forms of healthcare utilization, a common collider that is an implicit selection criterion when one reuses EHR data. Directed acyclic graphs (DAGs) are introduced as a tool for identifying potential sources of bias during study design and planning. References for additional resources on causal inference and DAG construction are provided.