Towards automated classification of intensive care nursing narratives.

Background: Nursing narratives are an important part of patient documentation, but the possibilities to utilize them in the direct care process are limited due to the lack of proper tools. One solution to facilitate the utilization of narrative data could be to classify them according to their content.

Objectives: Our objective is to address two issues related to designing an automated classifier: domain experts' agreement on the content of classes Breathing, Blood Circulation and Pain, as well as the ability of a machine-learning-based classifier to learn the classification patterns of the nurses.

Towards automated classification of intensive care nursing narratives.

Nursing narratives are an important part of patient documentation, but the possibilities to utilize them in the direct care process are limited due to the lack of proper tools. One solution to facilitate the utilization of narrative data could be to classify them according to their content. In this paper, we addressed two issues related to designing an automated classifier: domain experts' agreement on the content of the classes into which the data are to be classified, and the ability of the machine-learning algorithm to perform the classification on an acceptable level.