Extracting smoking data from GP electronic health records

Although health promotion data such as body mass index have been extracted from GP records for many years, there has been far less interest in tabulating numerical smoking data. Focus seems to be on stopping smoking (which is excellent in itself) rather than using smoking information to predict disease at either an individual or population level. This is probably due to the lack of recommended software recording standards for smoking in the computer systems available. This is a glaring elephant in the room for the future screening of lung cancer or other smoking-related diseases.

• © British Journal of General Practice 2021