Automatic Extraction of Risk Factors for Dialysis Patients from Clinical Notes Using Natural Language Processing Techniques

Studies have shown that mental health and comorbidities such as de-mentia, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases are risk factors for dialysis patients. Extracting accurate and timely information associated with these risk factors in the patient health records is not only important for dialysis patient management, but also for real-world evidence generation. We presented HERALD, an natural language processing (NLP) system for extracting information related to risk factors of dialysis patients from free-text progress notes in an electronic dialysis patient management system. By converting semi-structured notes into complete sentences before feeding them into the NLP module, the HERALD system was able achieved 99%, 83% and 80% accuracy in identifying dementia, diabetes and infarction, respectively.