AJMC January 20, 2021
Natural language processing can be used for automated extraction of social work interventions from electronic health records, thereby supporting social work staffing and resource allocation decisions.
Objectives: Health care organizations are increasingly employing social workers to address patients’ social needs. However, social work (SW) activities in health care settings are largely captured as text data within electronic health records (EHRs), making measurement and analysis difficult. This study aims to extract and classify, from EHR notes, interventions intended to address patients’ social needs using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) algorithms.
Study Design: Secondary data analysis of a longitudinal cohort.
Methods: We extracted 815 SW encounter notes from the EHR system of a federally...