Free-Text Documentation of Dementia Symptoms in Home Healthcare: A Natural Language Processing Study.

ABSTRACT:

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

SUBMITTER: Topaz M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7520927 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jan-Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature