The Role of Electronic Health Records to Identify Risk Factors for Developing Long COVID: A Scoping Review

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was considered a global pandemic from December 2019 to May 2023. A subset of COVID-19 patients develops long-lasting sequelae, commonly referred to as long COVID. This scoping review aimed to identify risk factors for long COVID reported in multiple studies and to determine the role of the secondary use of Electronic Health Records to identify these risk factors. An electronic search was conducted on Scopus, PubMed, and Web of Science, and 46 studies were included in this review after the selection process. Thirty-one risk factors were identified, with the most referred ones being female sex, age, severity of infection and obesity. In terms of data collection, Electronic Health Records were used by 63.0% of the studies, although only 21.7% were retrospective studies exclusively based on the secondary use of Electronic Health Records data. These results show that the potential of clinical research based on the secondary use of data collected from Electronic Health Records is not yet fully achieved, despite the respective advantages when compared with other data collection methods such as remote surveys.