title: Extracting Concepts Related to Homelessness from the Free Text of VA Electronic Medical Records.
abstract: Mining the free text of electronic medical records (EMR) using natural language processing (NLP) is an effective method of extracting information not always captured in administrative data. We sought to determine if concepts related to homelessness, a non-medical condition, were amenable to extraction from the EMR of Veterans Affairs (VA) medical records. As there were no off-the-shelf products, a lexicon of terms related to homelessness was created. A corpus of free text documents from outpatient encounters was reviewed to create the reference standard for NLP training and testing. V3NLP Framework was used to detect instances of lexical terms and was compared to the reference standard. With a positive predictive value of 77% for extracting relevant concepts, this study demonstrates the feasibility of extracting positively asserted concepts related to homelessness from the free text of medical records.
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Adi V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Gundlapalli
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Marjorie E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Carter
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Guy
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Divita
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Shuying
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shen
authors.affiliation: University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Miland
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Palmer
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Brett
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: South
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: B S Begum
authors.initials: BS
authors.lastname: Durgahee
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Redd
authors.affiliation: VA Salt Lake City Health Care System, Salt Lake City, UT ; University of Utah School of Medicine, Salt Lake City, UT.
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Samore
mesh_terms: D057286:Electronic Health Records; D006703:Ill-Housed Persons; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D009626:Terminology as Topic