Leveraging natural language processing to identify eligible lung cancer screening patients with the electronic health record

Abstract

Objective: To develop and validate an approach that identifies patients eligible for lung cancer screening (LCS) by combining structured and unstructured smoking data from the electronic health record (EHR).

Methods: We identified patients aged 50-80 years who had at least one encounter in a primary care clinic at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC) between 2019 and 2022. We fine-tuned an existing natural language processing (NLP) tool to extract quantitative smoking information using clinical notes collected from VUMC. Then, we developed an approach to identify patients who are eligible for LCS by combining smoking information from structured data and clinical narratives. We compared this method with two approaches to identify LCS eligibility only using smoking information from structured EHR. We used 50 patients with a documented history of tobacco use for comparison and validation.

Results: 102,475 patients were included. The NLP-based approach achieved an F1-score of 0.909, and accuracy of 0.96. The baseline approach could identify 5,887 patients. Compared to the baseline approach, the number of identified patients using all structured data and the NLP-based algorithm was 7,194 (22.2 %) and 10,231 (73.8 %), respectively. The NLP-based approach identified 589 Black/African Americans, a significant increase of 119 %.

Conclusion: We present a feasible NLP-based approach to identify LCS eligible patients. It provides a technical basis for the development of clinical decision support tools to potentially improve the utilization of LCS and diminish healthcare disparities.

Keywords: Electronic health record; Lung cancer screening; Natural language processing.