Research

Two questions: who has a substance use disorder in the record, and what should decision support look like?

Our phenotyping work identifies substance use disorder in electronic health records accurately enough to support multi-site research. Our decision support work tests interface designs empirically rather than by intuition.

Projects

Active
Substance use disorder phenotyping
Diagnostic codes miss most people with substance use disorder, and genetic studies need many institutions to agree on who has one. We build probabilistic phenotypes from billing codes, medications, and clinical notes, using interpretable NLP that clinicians can audit.
About the project →
Funding
NIH/NIDA DP1DA056667, Avenir Award (PI: Jeffery)
NIH/NIDA R03 (PI: Niarchou)
Software
sudregex on PyPI
abc_regex on GitHub
Completed
SPECTACULAR
Systematic Process for the Equitable Customization of Technology Applied to Contexts and Users for Learning and Adapting Rapidly
A method that combines a factorial research design with a Bayesian adaptive trial to evaluate many design options for clinical decision support rapidly and empirically, with respect to both nurses’ preferences and their performance.
About the project →
Funding
Betty Irene Moore Fellowship for Nurse Leaders and Innovators (Jeffery, 2022 cohort)
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Contact us

Software

We release the code behind our papers so other teams can reproduce and extend the work.

sudregex
Python package · MIT · v0.1.8, July 2026
Regex-driven extraction for clinical text, with configurable negation scope, substance-context gating, and false-positive pruning. Reports match counts, not just flags. Runs on pandas locally or distributed on Spark and Databricks.
pip install sudregex
- PyPI →
- Source →
abc_regex
Python · research code
Automates the Addiction Behaviors Checklist over clinical notes with regular expressions. The published code for our 2025 JAMA Psychiatry study.
- Source →
- Paper →
Snorkel Interactive
Not publicly released · available on request
Research teams interested in using it can contact us for access.
- Request access →

Projects

Substance use disorder phenotyping

SPECTACULAR

Software

sudregex

abc_regex

Snorkel Interactive