Epidemiology of nontuberculous mycobacterial infections in the U.S. Veterans Health Administration

We identified patients with non-tuberculous mycobacterial (NTM) disease in the US Veterans Health Administration (VHA), examined the distribution of diseases by NTM species, and explored the association between NTM disease and the frequency of clinic visits and mortality.We combined mycobacterial isolate (from natural language processing) with ICD-9-CM diagnoses from VHA data between 2008 and 2012 and then applied modified ATS/IDSA guidelines...