Prediction of Readmission in Geriatric Patients From Clinical Notes: Retrospective Text Mining Study.

BACKGROUND: Prior literature suggests that psychosocial factors adversely impact health and health care utilization outcomes. However, psychosocial factors are typically not captured by the structured data in electronic medical records (EMRs) but are rather recorded as free text in different types of clinical notes. OBJECTIVE: We here propose a text-mining approach to analyze EMRs to identify older adults with key psychosocial factors that predict adverse health care utilization outcomes, measured by 30-day readmission. The psychological factors were appended to the LACE (Length of stay, Acuity of the admission, Comorbidity of the patient, and Emergency department use) Index for Readmission to improve the prediction of readmission risk. METHODS: We performed a retrospective analysis using EMR notes of 43,216 hospitalization encounters in a hospital from January 1, 2017 to February 28, 2019. The mean age of the cohort was 67.51 years (SD 15.87), the mean length of stay was 5.57 days (SD 10.41), and the mean intensive care unit stay was 5% (SD 22%). We employed text-mining techniques to extract psychosocial topics that are representative of these patients and tested the utility of these topics in predicting 30-day hospital readmission beyond the predictive value of the LACE Index for Readmission. RESULTS: The added text-mined factors improved the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of the readmission prediction by 8.46% for geriatric patients, 6.99% for the general hospital population, and 6.64% for frequent admitters. Medical social workers and case managers captured more of the psychosocial text topics than physicians. CONCLUSIONS: The results of this study demonstrate the feasibility of extracting psychosocial factors from EMR clinical notes and the value of these notes in improving readmission risk prediction. Psychosocial profiles of patients can be curated and quantified from text mining clinical notes and these profiles can be successfully applied to artificial intelligence models to improve readmission risk prediction.

Artificial intelligence in sepsis early prediction and diagnosis using unstructured data in healthcare.

Sepsis is a leading cause of death in hospitals. Early prediction and diagnosis of sepsis, which is critical in reducing mortality, is challenging as many of its signs and symptoms are similar to other less critical conditions. We develop an artificial intelligence algorithm, SERA algorithm, which uses both structured data and unstructured clinical notes to predict and diagnose sepsis. We test this algorithm with independent, clinical notes and achieve high predictive accuracy 12 hours before the onset of sepsis (AUC 0.94, sensitivity 0.87 and specificity 0.87). We compare the SERA algorithm against physician predictions and show the algorithm's potential to increase the early detection of sepsis by up to 32% and reduce false positives by up to 17%. Mining unstructured clinical notes is shown to improve the algorithm's accuracy compared to using only clinical measures for early warning 12 to 48 hours before the onset of sepsis.