Identifying Heart Failure Symptoms and Poor Self-Management in Home Healthcare: A Natural Language Processing Study

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sena Chae ◽  
Jiyoun Song ◽  
Marietta Ojo ◽  
Maxim Topaz

The goal of this natural language processing (NLP) study was to identify patients in home healthcare with heart failure symptoms and poor self-management (SM). The preliminary lists of symptoms and poor SM status were identified, NLP algorithms were used to refine the lists, and NLP performance was evaluated using 2.3 million home healthcare clinical notes. The overall precision to identify patients with heart failure symptoms and poor SM status was 0.86. The feasibility of methods was demonstrated to identify patients with heart failure symptoms and poor SM documented in home healthcare notes. This study facilitates utilizing key symptom information and patients’ SM status from unstructured data in electronic health records. The results of this study can be applied to better individualize symptom management to support heart failure patients’ quality-of-life.

Author(s):  
Margot Yann ◽  
Therese Stukel ◽  
Liisa Jaakkimainen ◽  
Karen Tu

IntroductionA number of challenges exist in analyzing unstructured free text data in electronic medical records (EMRs). EMR text are difficult to represent and model due to their high dimensionality, heterogeneity, sparsity, incompleteness, random errors and the presence of noise. Objectives and ApproachStandard Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools make errors when applied to clinical notes due to physician use of unconventional language, involving polysemy, abbreviations, ambiguity, misspelling, variations, and negation. This paper presents a novel NLP framework, “Clinical Learning On Natural Expression” (CLONE), to automatically learn from a large primary care EMR database, analyzing free text clinical notes from primary care practices. CLONE’s predictive clinical models using text mining and neural network approach to extract features to identify patterns. To demonstrate effectiveness, we evaluate CLONE’s ability in a case study to identify patients with a specific chronic condition: congestive heart failure (CHF). ResultsA random selected sample of 7500 patients from Electronic Medical Record Administrative data Linked Database (EMRALD) is used. In this dataset, each patient’s medical chart includes a reference standard, manually reviewed by medical practitioners. Prevalence of CHF is approximately 2%. The low prevalence leads to another challenging problem in machine learning: imbalanced datasets. After pre-processing, we build deep learning models to represent and extract important medical information from free text to identify CHF patients through analyzing patient charts. We evaluated the effectiveness of CLONE by comparing the predicted labels with the standard references on a holdout test dataset. Comparing it with a number of alternative algorithms, we improve the overall accuracy to over 90% on a test dataset. Conclusion/ImplicationsAs the role of NLP in EMR data expands, the CLONE natural language processing framework can lead to substantial reduction in manual processing, while improving predictive accuracy.


2016 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 147-165 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maxim Topaz ◽  
Kavita Radhakrishnan ◽  
Suzanne Blackley ◽  
Victor Lei ◽  
Kenneth Lai ◽  
...  

This study developed an innovative natural language processing algorithm to automatically identify heart failure (HF) patients with ineffective self-management status (in the domains of diet, physical activity, medication adherence, and adherence to clinician appointments) from narrative discharge summary notes. We also analyzed the association between self-management status and preventable 30-day hospital readmissions. Our natural language system achieved relatively high accuracy ( F-measure = 86.3%; precision = 95%; recall = 79.2%) on a testing sample of 300 notes annotated by two human reviewers. In a sample of 8,901 HF patients admitted to our healthcare system, 14.4% ( n = 1,282) had documentation of ineffective HF self-management. Adjusted regression analyses indicated that presence of any skill-related self-management deficit (odds ratio [OR] = 1.3, 95% confidence interval [CI] = [1.1, 1.6]) and non-specific ineffective self-management (OR = 1.5, 95% CI = [1.2, 2]) was significantly associated with readmissions. We have demonstrated the feasibility of identifying ineffective HF self-management from electronic discharge summaries with natural language processing.


2020 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 233372142095986
Author(s):  
Maxim Topaz ◽  
Victoria Adams ◽  
Paula Wilson ◽  
Kyungmi Woo ◽  
Miriam Ryvicker

Background: Little is known about symptom documentation related to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) by home healthcare (HHC) clinicians. Objective: This study: (1) developed a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that identifies common neuropsychiatric symptoms of ADRD in HHC free-text clinical notes; (2) described symptom clusters and hospitalization or emergency department (ED) visit rates for patients with and without these symptoms. Method: We examined a corpus of −2.6 million free-text notes for 112,237 HHC episodes among 89,459 patients admitted to a non-profit HHC agency for post-acute care with any diagnosis. We used NLP software (NimbleMiner) to construct indicators of six neuropsychiatric symptoms. Structured HHC assessment data were used to identify known ADRD diagnoses and construct measures of hospitalization/ED use during HHC. Results: Neuropsychiatric symptoms were documented for 40% of episodes. Common clusters included impaired memory, anxiety and/or depressed mood. One in three episodes without an ADRD diagnosis had documented symptoms. Hospitalization/ED rates increased with one or more symptoms present. Conclusion: HHC providers should examine episodes with neuropsychiatric symptoms but no ADRD diagnoses to determine whether ADRD diagnosis was missed or to recommend ADRD evaluation. NLP-generated symptom indicators can help to identify high-risk patients for targeted interventions.


Heart ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. heartjnl-2021-319769
Author(s):  
Meghan Reading Turchioe ◽  
Alexander Volodarskiy ◽  
Jyotishman Pathak ◽  
Drew N Wright ◽  
James Enlou Tcheng ◽  
...  

Natural language processing (NLP) is a set of automated methods to organise and evaluate the information contained in unstructured clinical notes, which are a rich source of real-world data from clinical care that may be used to improve outcomes and understanding of disease in cardiology. The purpose of this systematic review is to provide an understanding of NLP, review how it has been used to date within cardiology and illustrate the opportunities that this approach provides for both research and clinical care. We systematically searched six scholarly databases (ACM Digital Library, Arxiv, Embase, IEEE Explore, PubMed and Scopus) for studies published in 2015–2020 describing the development or application of NLP methods for clinical text focused on cardiac disease. Studies not published in English, lacking a description of NLP methods, non-cardiac focused and duplicates were excluded. Two independent reviewers extracted general study information, clinical details and NLP details and appraised quality using a checklist of quality indicators for NLP studies. We identified 37 studies developing and applying NLP in heart failure, imaging, coronary artery disease, electrophysiology, general cardiology and valvular heart disease. Most studies used NLP to identify patients with a specific diagnosis and extract disease severity using rule-based NLP methods. Some used NLP algorithms to predict clinical outcomes. A major limitation is the inability to aggregate findings across studies due to vastly different NLP methods, evaluation and reporting. This review reveals numerous opportunities for future NLP work in cardiology with more diverse patient samples, cardiac diseases, datasets, methods and applications.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ye Seul Bae ◽  
Kyung Hwan Kim ◽  
Han Kyul Kim ◽  
Sae Won Choi ◽  
Taehoon Ko ◽  
...  

BACKGROUND Smoking is a major risk factor and important variable for clinical research, but there are few studies regarding automatic obtainment of smoking classification from unstructured bilingual electronic health records (EHR). OBJECTIVE We aim to develop an algorithm to classify smoking status based on unstructured EHRs using natural language processing (NLP). METHODS With acronym replacement and Python package Soynlp, we normalize 4,711 bilingual clinical notes. Each EHR notes was classified into 4 categories: current smokers, past smokers, never smokers, and unknown. Subsequently, SPPMI (Shifted Positive Point Mutual Information) is used to vectorize words in the notes. By calculating cosine similarity between these word vectors, keywords denoting the same smoking status are identified. RESULTS Compared to other keyword extraction methods (word co-occurrence-, PMI-, and NPMI-based methods), our proposed approach improves keyword extraction precision by as much as 20.0%. These extracted keywords are used in classifying 4 smoking statuses from our bilingual clinical notes. Given an identical SVM classifier, the extracted keywords improve the F1 score by as much as 1.8% compared to those of the unigram and bigram Bag of Words. CONCLUSIONS Our study shows the potential of SPPMI in classifying smoking status from bilingual, unstructured EHRs. Our current findings show how smoking information can be easily acquired and used for clinical practice and research.


Vector representations for language have been shown to be useful in a number of Natural Language Processing tasks. In this paper, we aim to investigate the effectiveness of word vector representations for the problem of Sentiment Analysis. In particular, we target three sub-tasks namely sentiment words extraction, polarity of sentiment words detection, and text sentiment prediction. We investigate the effectiveness of vector representations over different text data and evaluate the quality of domain-dependent vectors. Vector representations has been used to compute various vector-based features and conduct systematically experiments to demonstrate their effectiveness. Using simple vector based features can achieve better results for text sentiment analysis of APP.


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