Decoding Pain Chronicity in Electronic Health Records: Feasibility of Automated Annotation of Pain Chronicity in Chronic Low Back Pain Patients

Chronic low back pain is a severe health condition with underlying biopsychosocial factors that make diagnosis difficult and pain chronicity has been shown to be an important variable for studying patient outcomes. However, chronicity is not typically recorded in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) and currently needs to be manually annotated by experts. Using a dataset from an interdisciplinary spine clinic at UCSF consisting of 394 patients manually annotated with pain chronicity by clinical experts, our study has two goals: 1) study the relationship between expert-annotated chronicity and other important variables and 2) study the feasibility of extraction of chronicity from the EHR without expert annotation.
Source: The Journal of Pain - Category: Materials Science Authors: Source Type: research