Vaping at the VA: Developing an Annotated Corpus of Electronic Cigarette Mentions in Clinical Notes at the Department of Veterans Affairs.

ABSTRACT

Use of Electronic Nicotine Delivery Systems (ENDS, colloquially known as "electronic cigarettes") has increased substantially in the United States in the decade since 2010. However, currently relatively little is known regarding the documentation of ENDS use in clinical notes. With this study, we describe the development of an annotation scheme (and associated annotated corpus) consisting of 4,351 ENDS mentions derived from Department of Veterans Affairs clinical notes during the period 2010-2020. Analysis of our corpus provides important insights into ENDS documentation practices at the VA, in addition to providing a resource for the future development and validation of Natural Language Processing algorithms capable of reliably identifying ENDS-use status.