Familial relationships in electronic health records (EHR) v2

Heritability is an important statistic for evaluating genetic contribution to phenotypes. Estimating heritability, however, requires a laborious recruitment of a large number of relatives. Electronic health records (EHR) contain massive relative information in emergency contact forms. Recently, we presented RIFTEHR, an algorithm for extracting relationships from EHR. Here, we present an updated version and reconstructed 4.2 million familial relationships from the latest New York-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center (CUIMC) EHR system. The number of updated relationships is 30 percent more than the last version. We present a new implementation of RIFTEHR, which runs in linear time, thus largely improves the speed of the algorithm. We also present a data encryption method, to protect patient privacy in running the algorithm. These resources can be used for generalized use of familial relationships from EHR in genetic studies.