Natural Language Processing for Identification of Refractory Status Epilepticus in Children

Abstract Objective Pediatric status epilepticus is one of the most frequent pediatric emergencies, with high mortality and morbidity. Utilizing electronic health records (EHR) permits analysis of care approaches and disease outcomes at a lower cost than prospective research. However, reviewing EHR manually is time intensive. We aimed to compare refractory status epilepticus (rSE) cases identified by human EHR review with a Natural language processing (NLP)‐assisted rSE screen followed by a manual review. Methods We used the NLP screening tool, Document Review Tool (DrT), to generate regular expressions, trained a bag‐of‐words NLP classifier on EHR from 2017–2019, and then tested our algorithm on data from February to December 2012. We compared results from manual review to NLP‐assisted search followed by manual review. Results Our algorithm identified 1528 notes in the test set. After removing notes pertaining to the same event by DrT, the user reviewed a total number of 400 notes to find patients with rSE. Within these 400 notes, we identified 31 rSE cases, including 12 new cases not found in manual review, and 19 of the 20 previously identified cases. The NLP‐assisted model found 31/32 cases with a sensitivity of 96.88% (95% C.I. 82‐99.84%), while manual review identified 20/32 cases, with a sensitivity of 62.5% (95% C.I. 43.75‐78.34%). Significance DrT provided a highly sensitive model compared to human review and an increase in patient identification through EHRs. The use of DrT is a suitable application of NLP for identifying patients with a history of recent rSE which ultimately contributes to the implementation of monitoring techniques and treatments in near real‐time.