Visiting Scholars

Rishi Vimal Parikh is currently a PhD student in Epidemiology and Population Health at Stanford University. Prior to attending Stanford, he spent several years working on healthcare-associated infection surveillance at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and studying cardiovascular disease epidemiology and health care delivery science at the Kaiser Permanente Northern California Division of Research. Rishi is interested in developing tools and methods for data extraction, risk prediction, and causal inference using electronic health data sources to better understand the social/behavioral, biological, and health system-level factors affecting cardiovascular disease risk. In his spare time, Rishi enjoys scuba diving and photographing the California kelp forests, backpacking in the Sierras, maintaining his solve streak for the NYT crossword puzzle, reading sci-fi novels, and spending time with his wife and newborn son.

Project at the CPV:

Observational data provides an important way of researching the many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic that cannot be assessed through randomized trials. However, documentation of both acute and long COVID has been highly variable, in part due to changing case definitions, the availability of rapid antibody testing for home use, and delays in implementing novel COVID-specific diagnostic codes within electronic health record systems. Preliminary research suggests that over one-third of patients who receive a COVID antiviral do not have a recorded diagnosis of COVID nor a documented lab positive. We plan to use natural language processing to develop a classification system for clinical notes to detect the presence of acute and long COVID in the PRIME database.