Title
Automated Classification of Consumer Health Information Needs in Patient Portal Messages.
Abstract
Patients have diverse health information needs, and secure messaging through patient portals is an emerging means by which such needs are expressed and met. As patient portal adoption increases, growing volumes of secure messages may burden healthcare providers. Automated classification could expedite portal message triage and answering. We created four automated classifiers based on word content and natural language processing techniques to identify health information needs in 1000 patient-generated portal messages. Logistic regression and random forest classifiers detected single information needs well, with area under the curves of 0.804-0.914. A logistic regression classifier accurately found the set of needs within a message, with a Jaccard index of 0.859 (95% Confidence Interval: (0.847, 0.871)). Automated classification of consumer health information needs expressed in patient portal messages is feasible and may allow direct linking to relevant resources or creation of institutional resources for commonly expressed needs.
Year
Venue
Field
2015
AMIA
Health care,World Wide Web,Secure messaging,Information needs,Computer science,Patient portal,Triage,Classifier (linguistics),Random forest,Logistic regression
DocType
Volume
Citations 
Conference
2015
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.49
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Robert M Cronin1639.71
Daniel Fabbri22312.03
Joshua C. Denny393297.43
Gretchen Purcell Jackson4459.41