BackgroundWe developed an accurate, stakeholder-informed, automated, natural language processing (NLP) system to measure the quality of heart failure (HF) inpatient care, and explored the potential for adoption of this system within an integrated health care system.ObjectiveTo accurately automate a United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) quality measure for inpatients with HF.MethodsWe automated the HF quality measure Congestive Heart Failure Inpatient Measure 19 (CHI19) that identifies whether a given patient has left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) <40%, and if so, whether an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or angiotensin-receptor blocker was prescribed at discharge if there were no contraindications. We used documents from 1083 unique inpatients from eight VA medical centers to develop a reference standard (RS) to train (n=314) and test (n=769) the Congestive Heart Failure Information Extraction Framework (CHIEF). We also conducted semi-structured interviews (n=15) for stakeholder feedback on implementation of the CHIEF.ResultsThe CHIEF classified each hospitalization in the test set with a sensitivity (SN) of 98.9% and positive predictive value of 98.7%, compared with an RS and SN of 98.5% for available External Peer Review Program assessments. Of the 1083 patients available for the NLP system, the CHIEF evaluated and classified 100% of cases. Stakeholders identified potential implementation facilitators and clinical uses of the CHIEF.ConclusionsThe CHIEF provided complete data for all patients in the cohort and could potentially improve the efficiency, timeliness, and utility of HF quality measurements.
Background Family history information is important to assess the risk of inherited medical conditions. Natural language processing has the potential to extract this information from unstructured free-text notes to improve patient care and decision making. We describe the end-to-end information extraction system the Medical University of South Carolina team developed when participating in the 2019 National Natural Language Processing Clinical Challenge (n2c2)/Open Health Natural Language Processing (OHNLP) shared task. Objective This task involves identifying mentions of family members and observations in electronic health record text notes and recognizing the 2 types of relations (family member-living status relations and family member-observation relations). Our system aims to achieve a high level of performance by integrating heuristics and advanced information extraction methods. Our efforts also include improving the performance of 2 subtasks by exploiting additional labeled data and clinical text-based embedding models. Methods We present a hybrid method that combines machine learning and rule-based approaches. We implemented an end-to-end system with multiple information extraction and attribute classification components. For entity identification, we trained bidirectional long short-term memory deep learning models. These models incorporated static word embeddings and context-dependent embeddings. We created a voting ensemble that combined the predictions of all individual models. For relation extraction, we trained 2 relation extraction models. The first model determined the living status of each family member. The second model identified observations associated with each family member. We implemented online gradient descent models to extract related entity pairs. As part of postchallenge efforts, we used the BioCreative/OHNLP 2018 corpus and trained new models with the union of these 2 datasets. We also pretrained language models using clinical notes from the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care (MIMIC-III) clinical database. Results The voting ensemble achieved better performance than individual classifiers. In the entity identification task, our top-performing system reached a precision of 78.90% and a recall of 83.84%. Our natural language processing system for entity identification took 3rd place out of 17 teams in the challenge. We ranked 4th out of 9 teams in the relation extraction task. Our system substantially benefited from the combination of the 2 datasets. Compared to our official submission with F1 scores of 81.30% and 64.94% for entity identification and relation extraction, respectively, the revised system yielded significantly better performance (P<.05) with F1 scores of 86.02% and 72.48%, respectively. Conclusions We demonstrated that a hybrid model could be used to successfully extract family history information recorded in unstructured free-text notes. In this study, our approach to entity identification as a sequence labeling problem produced satisfactory results. Our postchallenge efforts significantly improved performance by leveraging additional labeled data and using word vector representations learned from large collections of clinical notes.
BACKGROUND Family history information is important to assess the risk of inherited medical conditions. Natural language processing has the potential to extract this information from unstructured free-text notes to improve patient care and decision-making. We describe the end-to-end information extraction system the Medical University of South Carolina team developed when participating in the 2019 n2c2/OHNLP shared task. OBJECTIVE This task involves identifying mentions of family members and observations in electronic health record text notes, and recognizing the relations between family members, observations, and living status. Our system aims to achieve a high level of performance by integrating heuristics and advanced information extraction methods. Our efforts also include improving the performance of two subtasks by exploiting additional labeled data and clinical text-based embedding models. METHODS We present a hybrid method that combines machine learning and rule-based approaches. We implemented an end-to-end system with multiple information extraction and attribute classification components. For entity identification, we trained bidirectional long short-term memory deep learning models. These models incorporated static word embeddings and context-dependent embeddings. We created a voting ensemble that combined the predictions of all individual models. For relation extraction, we trained two relation extraction models. The first model determined the living status of each family member. The second model identified observations associated with each family member. We implemented online gradient descent models to extract related entity pairs. As part of post-challenge efforts, we used the BioCreative/OHNLP 2018 corpus and trained new models with the union of these two data sets. We also pre-trained language models using clinical notes from the MIMIC-III clinical database. RESULTS The voting ensemble achieved better performance than individual classifiers. In the entity identification task, the best performing system reached a precision of 78.90% and a recall of 83.84%. Our NLP system for entity identification and relation extraction ranked 3rd and 4th respectively in the challenge. Our end-to-end pipeline system substantially benefited from the combination of the two data sets. Compared to our official submission, the revised system yielded significantly better performance (p < 0.05) with F1-scores of 86.02% and 72.48% for entity identification and relation extraction, respectively. CONCLUSIONS We demonstrated that a hybrid model could be used to successfully extract family history information recorded in unstructured free-text notes. In this study, our approach of entity identification as a sequence labeling problem produced satisfactory results. Our post-challenge efforts significantly improved performance by leveraging additional labeled data and using word vector representations learned from large collections of clinical notes.
BACKGROUND We developed an accurate, stakeholder-informed, automated, natural language processing (NLP) system to measure the quality of heart failure (HF) inpatient care, and explored the potential for adoption of this system within an integrated health care system. OBJECTIVE To accurately automate a United States Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) quality measure for inpatients with HF. METHODS We automated the HF quality measure Congestive Heart Failure Inpatient Measure 19 (CHI19) that identifies whether a given patient has left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) <40%, and if so, whether an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor or angiotensin-receptor blocker was prescribed at discharge if there were no contraindications. We used documents from 1083 unique inpatients from eight VA medical centers to develop a reference standard (RS) to train (n=314) and test (n=769) the Congestive Heart Failure Information Extraction Framework (CHIEF). We also conducted semi-structured interviews (n=15) for stakeholder feedback on implementation of the CHIEF. RESULTS The CHIEF classified each hospitalization in the test set with a sensitivity (SN) of 98.9% and positive predictive value of 98.7%, compared with an RS and SN of 98.5% for available External Peer Review Program assessments. Of the 1083 patients available for the NLP system, the CHIEF evaluated and classified 100% of cases. Stakeholders identified potential implementation facilitators and clinical uses of the CHIEF. CONCLUSIONS The CHIEF provided complete data for all patients in the cohort and could potentially improve the efficiency, timeliness, and utility of HF quality measurements.
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