Identifying Patients' Smoking Status from Electronic Dental Records Data

Abstract

Smoking is a significant risk factor for initiation and progression of oral diseases. A patient's current smoking status and tobacco dependency can aid clinical decision making and treatment planning. The free-text nature of this data limits accessibility causing obstacles during the time of care and research utility. No studies exist on extracting patient's smoking status automatically from the Electronic Dental Record. This study reports the development and evaluation of an NLP system for this purpose.