Healthcare utilization is a collider: an introduction to collider bias in EHR data reuse.
Collider bias is a common threat to internal validity in clinical research but is rarely mentioned in informatics education or literature. Conditioning on a collider, which is a variable that is the shared causal descendant of an exposure and outcome, may result in spurious associations between the exposure and outcome. Our objective is to introduce readers to collider bias and its corollaries in the retrospective analysis of electronic health record [...]
Author(s): Weiskopf, Nicole G, Dorr, David A, Jackson, Christie, Lehmann, Harold P, Thompson, Caroline A
DOI: 10.1093/jamia/ocad013