Data-driven Identification for Substance Misuse

In 2016, nearly 30% hospital discharges in the United States (US) had a major diagnostic category for a substance-use related condition. Substance misuse ranks second among principal diagnoses for unplanned 7-day hospital readmission rates. Despite the availability of Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) interventions, substance misuse is not part of the admission routine and only a minority of patients are screened for substance misuse in the hospital setting. This is particularly problematic, since among hospitalized inpatients, the prevalence of substance misuse is estimated to be as high as 25%, greater than either the general population or outpatient setting. Practical screening methods tailored for the hospital setting are needed. In the advent of Meaningful Use in the electronic health record (EHR), efficiency for alcohol detection may be improved by leveraging data collected during usual care. Documentation of substance use is common and occurs in over 96% of provider admission notes, but their free text format renders them difficult to mine and analyze. Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning are subfields of artificial intelligence (AI) that provide a solution to analyze text data in the EHR to identify substance misuse. Modern NLP has fused with machine learning, another sub-field of artificial intelligence focused on learning from data. In particular, the most powerful NLP methods rely on supervised learning, a type of machine learning that takes advantage of current reference standards to make predictions about unseen cases In the earlier version of an NLP and machine learning tool, the investigators successfully used data from clinical notes collected in the first 24 hours of hospital admission to reach a sensitivity and specificity above 70% for identifying alcohol misuse. With nearly 36 million hospital admissions in 2016, a substance misuse classifier has potential to impact millions. In this study, the aim is to prospectively implement a substance misuse classifier to examine its effectiveness against current practice of all hospitalized adult patients at a tertiary health system. The health system has a mature screening system to examine substance misuse classifier performance against current practice of questionnaire screening. The hypothesis is that the substance misuse classifier may provide a standardized, interoperable, and accurate approach to screen hospitalized patients. Successful implementation of the classifier in hospitalized patients is a step towards an automated and comprehensive universal screening system for substance misuse.