Article Excerpt: An automated process that combines natural language processing and machine learning identified people who inject drugs (PWID) in electronic health records more quickly and accurately than current methods that rely on manual record reviews. Currently, people who inject drugs are identified through International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes that are specified in patients’ electronic health records by the health care providers or extracted from those notes by trained human coders who review them for billing purposes. But there is no specific ICD code for injection drug use, so providers and coders must rely on a combination of non-specific codes as proxies to identify PWIDs—a slow approach that can lead to inaccuracies.

Full Article: https://tinyurl.com/2p9b7wc3

Article Source: Medical XPress