Using Natural Language Processing to Classify Serious Illness Communication with Oncology Patients.

One core measure of healthcare quality set forth by the Institute of Medicine is whether care decisions match patient goals. High-quality "serious illness communication" about patient goals and prognosis is required to support patient-centered decision-making, however current methods are not sensitive enough to measure the quality of this communication or determine whether care delivered matches patient priorities. Natural language processing (NLP) offers an efficient method for identification and evaluation of documented serious illness communication, which could serve as the basis for future quality metrics in oncology and other forms of serious illness. In this study, we trained NLP algorithms to identify and characterize serious illness communication with oncology patients.

Improving Risk Assessment of Miscarriage During Pregnancy with Knowledge Graph Embeddings.

Miscarriages are the most common type of pregnancy loss, mostly occurring in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. Pregnancy risk assessment aims to quantify evidence to reduce such maternal morbidities, and personalized decision support systems are the cornerstone of high-quality, patient-centered care to improve diagnosis, treatment selection, and risk assessment. However, data sparsity and the increasing number of patient-level observations require more effective forms of representing clinical knowledge to encode known information that enables performing inference and reasoning. Whereas knowledge embedding representation has been widely explored in the open domain data, there are few efforts for its application in the clinical domain. In this study, we contrast differences among multiple embedding strategies, and we demonstrate how these methods can assist in performing risk assessment of miscarriage before and during pregnancy. Our experiments show that simple knowledge embedding approaches that utilize domain-specific metadata perform better than complex embedding strategies, although both can improve results comparatively to a population probabilistic baseline in both AUPRC, F1-score, and a proposed normalized version of these evaluation metrics that better reflects accuracy for unbalanced datasets. Finally, embedding approaches provide evidence about each individual, supporting explainability for its model predictions in such a way that humans understand.

Natural Language Processing for Mimicking Clinical Trial Recruitment in Critical Care: A Semi-Automated Simulation Based on the LeoPARDS Trial.

Clinical trials often fail to recruit an adequate number of appropriate patients. Identifying eligible trial participants is resource-intensive when relying on manual review of clinical notes, particularly in critical care settings where the time window is short. Automated review of electronic health records (EHR) may help, but much of the information is in free text rather than a computable form. We applied natural language processing (NLP) to free text EHR data using the CogStack platform to simulate recruitment into the LeoPARDS study, a clinical trial aiming to reduce organ dysfunction in septic shock. We applied an algorithm to identify eligible patients using a moving 1-hour time window, and compared patients identified by our approach with those actually screened and recruited for the trial, for the time period that data were available. We manually reviewed records of a random sample of patients identified by the algorithm but not screened in the original trial. Our method identified 376 patients, including 34 patients with EHR data available who were actually recruited to LeoPARDS in our centre. The sensitivity of CogStack for identifying patients screened was 90% (95% CI 85%, 93%). Of the 203 patients identified by both manual screening and CogStack, the index date matched in 95 (47%) and CogStack was earlier in 94 (47%). In conclusion, analysis of EHR data using NLP could effectively replicate recruitment in a critical care trial, and identify some eligible patients at an earlier stage, potentially improving trial recruitment if implemented in real time.

Combining string and phonetic similarity matching to identify misspelt names of drugs in medical records written in Portuguese.

BACKGROUND: There is an increasing amount of unstructured medical data that can be analysed for different purposes. However, information extraction from free text data may be particularly inefficient in the presence of spelling errors. Existing approaches use string similarity methods to search for valid words within a text, coupled with a supporting dictionary. However, they are not rich enough to encode both typing and phonetic misspellings. RESULTS: Experimental results showed a joint string and language-dependent phonetic similarity is more accurate than traditional string distance metrics when identifying misspelt names of drugs in a set of medical records written in Portuguese. CONCLUSION: We present a hybrid approach to efficiently perform similarity match that overcomes the loss of information inherit from using either exact match search or string based similarity search methods.