title: Detecting unplanned care from clinician notes in electronic health records.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  Reduction in unplanned episodes of care, such as emergency department visits and unplanned hospitalizations, are important quality outcome measures. However, many events are only documented in free-text clinician notes and are labor intensive to detect by manual medical record review.
  
  
  METHODS
  We studied 308,096 free-text machine-readable documents linked to individual entries in our electronic health records, representing care for patients with breast, GI, or thoracic cancer, whose treatment was initiated at one academic medical center, Stanford Health Care (SHC). Using a clinical text-mining tool, we detected unplanned episodes documented in clinician notes (for non-SHC visits) or in coded encounter data for SHC-delivered care and the most frequent symptoms documented in emergency department (ED) notes.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Combined reporting increased the identification of patients with one or more unplanned care visits by 32% (15% using coded data; 20% using all the data) among patients with 3 months of follow-up and by 21% (23% using coded data; 28% using all the data) among those with 1 year of follow-up. Based on the textual analysis of SHC ED notes, pain (75%), followed by nausea (54%), vomiting (47%), infection (36%), fever (28%), and anemia (27%), were the most frequent symptoms mentioned. Pain, nausea, and vomiting co-occur in 35% of all ED encounter notes.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The text-mining methods we describe can be applied to automatically review free-text clinician notes to detect unplanned episodes of care mentioned in these notes. These methods have broad application for quality improvement efforts in which events of interest occur outside of a network that allows for patient data sharing.
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA stamang@stanford.edu.
authors.forename: Suzanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Tamang
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
authors.forename: Manali I
authors.initials: MI
authors.lastname: Patel
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
authors.forename: Douglas W
authors.initials: DW
authors.lastname: Blayney
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kuznetsov
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
authors.forename: Samuel G
authors.initials: SG
authors.lastname: Finlayson
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
authors.forename: Yohan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Vetteth
authors.affiliation: Stanford University School of Medicine; Stanford Health Care, Stanford, CA; and Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA.
authors.forename: Nigam
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Shah
mesh_terms: D000046:Academic Medical Centers; D002140:California; D057225:Data Mining; D003695:Delivery of Health Care; D057286:Electronic Health Records; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital; D006760:Hospitalization; D006801:Humans; D008495:Medical Oncology; D009369:Neoplasms / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000628:therapy*; D010347:Patient Care Planning; D018570:Risk Assessment; D012307:Risk Factors; D013997:Time Factors