Exploration and Initial Development of Text Classification Models to Identify Health Information Technology Usability-Related Patient Safety Event Reports.

Background: With the pervasive use of health information technology (HIT) there has been increased concern over the usability and safety of this technology. Identifying HIT usability and safety hazards, mitigating those hazards to prevent patient harm, and using this knowledge to improve future HIT systems are critical to advancing health care.

Purpose: The purpose of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility of a modeling approach to identify HIT usability-related patient safety events (PSEs) from the free-text of safety reports and the utility of such models for supporting patient safety analysts in their analysis of event data.