Natural language processing to identify social determinants of health in Alzheimer's disease and related dementia from electronic health records.

Objective: To develop a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm that identifies social determinants of health (SDoH), including housing, transportation, food, and medication insecurities, social isolation, abuse, neglect, or exploitation, and financial difficulties for patients with Alzheimer's disease and related dementias (ADRD) from unstructured electronic health records (EHRs).

Data Sources And Study Setting: We leveraged 1000 medical notes randomly selected from 7401 emergency department and inpatient social worker notes generated between 2015 and 2019 for 231 unique patients diagnosed with ADRD at Michigan Medicine.

Study Design: We developed a rule-based NLP algorithm for the identification of seven domains of SDoH noted above.