Unstructured Data Are Superior to Structured Data for Eliciting Quantitative Smoking History From the Electronic Health Record.

Purpose: Develop a method for extracting smoking status and quantitative smoking history from clinician notes to facilitate cohort identification for low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) scanning for early detection of lung cancer.

Materials And Methods: A sample of 4,615 adult patients were randomly selected from the Multiparameter Intelligent Monitoring in Critical Care (MIMIC-III) database. The structured data were obtained by queries of the diagnosis tables using the International Classification of Diseases codes in use at that time.