Identify Opiod Use Problem

Abstract

The aim of this research is to design a new method to identify the opioid use problems (OUP) among long-term opioid therapy patients in Indiana University Health using text mining and machine learning approaches. First, a systematic review was conducted to investigate the current variables, methods, and opioid problem definitions used in the literature. We identified 75 distinct variables in 9 models that majorly used ICD codes to identify the opioid problem (OUP). The review concluded that using ICD codes alone may not be enough to determine the real size of the opioid problem and more effort is needed to adopt other methods to understand the issue. Next, we developed a text mining approach to identify OUP and compared the results with the current conventional method of identifying OUP using ICD-9 codes. Following the institutional review board and an approval from the Regenstrief Institute, structured and unstructured data of 14,298 IUH patients were collected from the Indiana Network for Patient Care. Our text mining approach identified 127 opioid cases compared to 45 cases identified by ICD codes. We concluded that the text mining approach may be used successfully to identify OUP from patients clinical notes. Moreover, we developed a machine learning approach to identify OUP by analyzing patients’ clinical notes. Our model was able to classify positive OUP from clinical notes with a sensitivity of 88% on unseen data. We concluded that the machine learning approach may be used successfully to identify the opioid use problem from patients’ clinical notes.