Team members from Holmusk recently attended the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s annual meeting and shared findings from a study that examined the relationship between executive functioning and illness severity in patients with ADHD.

EHR data captures how patients with ADHD present in a real-world clinical setting, meaning that Holmusk, which has curated the industry-leading source of real-world clinical data for behavioral health, was well positioned to conduct this study.

Researchers used NeuroBlu, Holmusk’s flagship data and analytics platform created to answer challenging questions in behavioral health, to build a cohort of over 30,000 patients and analyze their de-identified, longitudinal EHR data. Patients who were included in the study had ADHD, a recorded CGI-S score (a measure of illness severity) and a recorded Mental State Examination (MSE). Using Holmusk’s proprietary natural language processing methods, researchers were able to transform unique clinical information from the free text of the MSE to structured, research-ready data.

About 3.1 percent of the studied cohort was found to have deficits in executive functioning. These patients were also more likely to have higher CGI-S scores at baseline, which suggests that deficits in executive functioning may be associated with higher illness severity.

“Because patients with deficits in executive functioning present differently in terms of how they interact with their peers, their families, and in other situations such as in an educational setting, it is difficult to identify these patients and learn more about their outcomes,” said Scott Kollins, PhD, Chief Medical Officer of Holmusk and lead author of the study. “However, identifying these patients—and knowing that they are at risk of worsened illness severity—could help clinicians in better understanding these individuals’ impairments and creating targeted treatment pathways to improve outcomes.”

View the poster here.