Identifying Goals of Care Conversations in the Electronic Health Record Using Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning.

ABSTRACT:

Context

Goals-of-care discussions are an important quality metric in palliative care. However, goals-of-care discussions are often documented as free text in diverse locations. It is difficult to identify these discussions in the electronic health record (EHR) efficiently.

Objectives

To develop, train, and test an automated approach to identifying goals-of-care discussions in the EHR, using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML).

Methods

From the electronic health records of an academic health system, we collected a purposive sample of 3183 EHR notes (1435 inpatient notes and 1748 outpatient notes) from 1426 patients with serious illness over 2008-2016, and manually reviewed each note for documentation of goals-of-care discussions. Separately, we

SUBMITTER: Lee RY 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7769906 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature