HERC Health Economics Seminar

Identifying Regional Anesthesia Procedures in the EHR Using Natural Language Processing

by Laura Graham, PhD, MPH
Seminar date: 6/18/2024

Description: Limited guidance for defining and documenting regional anesthesia has resulted in wide variation in documentation practices, which can lead to missing and inaccurate data. This seminar will present a natural language processing (NLP)-based algorithm we developed to identify regional anesthesia within unstructured clinical notes. We compared the performance of the NLP-based algorithm to regional anesthesia documentation in CDW and identified more than twice as many regional anesthesia cases using the NLP-based algorithm; findings have implications for regional anesthesia practice, research, and quality improvement efforts.

Intended Audience: Researchers, clinicians, and administrators involved in anesthesia and researchers interested in NLP techniques.

View archived session video:

DOWNLOAD: PDF handout | Audio only (mp3) | transcript

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