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Methods Inf Med 2013; 52(01): 33-42
DOI: 10.3414/ME12-01-0012
Original Articles
Schattauer GmbH

A Proof of Concept for Assessing Emergency Room Use with Primary Care Data and Natural Language Processing[*]

J. St-Maurice
1   School of Health and Life Sciences and Community Services, Conestoga College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Kitchener, Ontario, Canada
2   School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
,
M.-H. Kuo
2   School of Health Information Science, University of Victoria, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
,
P. Gooch
3   Centre for Health Informatics, City University, London, UK
› Author Affiliations
Further Information

Publication History

received: 19 February 2012

accepted: 19 September 2012

Publication Date:
20 January 2018 (online)

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Summary

Objective: The objective of this study was to undertake a proof of concept that demonstrated the use of primary care data and natural language processing and term extraction to assess emergency room use. The study extracted biopsychosocial concepts from primary care free text and related them to inappropriate emergency room use through the use of odds ratios.

Methods: De-identified free text notes were extracted from a primary care clinic in Guelph, Ontario and analyzed with a software toolkit that incorporated General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) and MetaMap components for natural language processing and term extraction.

Results: Over 10 million concepts were extracted from 13,836 patient records. Codes found in at least 1% percent of the sample were regressed against inappropriate emergency room use. 77 codes fell within the realm of biopsychosocial, were very statistically significant (p < 0.001) and had an OR > 2.0. Thematically, these codes involved mental health and pain related concepts.

Conclusions: Analyzed thematically, mental health issues and pain are important themes; we have concluded that pain and mental health problems are primary drivers for inappropriate emergency room use. Age and sex were not significant. This proof of concept demonstrates the feasibly of combining natural language processing and primary care data to analyze a system use question. As a first work it supports further research and could be applied to investigate other, more complex problems.

Keywords

Primary care data - natural language processing - term extraction - emergency room inappropriate use - measurement methodology - service utilization

* Supplementary material published on our website www.methods-online.com


 

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