Learning When Communications Between Healthcare Providers Indicate Hormonal Therapy Medication Discontinuation.

Learning When Communications Between Healthcare Providers Indicate Hormonal Therapy Medication Discontinuation. AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2018;2018:1591-1600 Authors: Yin Z, Warner JL, Malin BA Abstract Hormonal therapy is an effective yet challenging long-term treatment for patients with hormone receptor positive breast cancer. Understanding what factors indicate discontinuation of a recommended hormonal therapy medication can help improve treatment experience. To date, studies on medication discontinuation have focused on patient information gathered through questionnaires, structured electronic medical records and online discussion boards. However, there has been little investigation into the communications between healthcare providers, which may provide additional indicators of patients' medication discontinuation, particularly from a clinical perspective. In this paper, we investigate the relation between such communications and hormonal therapy medication discontinuation. We studied a cohort of 2,579 patients on hormonal therapy at the Vanderbilt University Medical Center over a 16-year period. We adopt a data-driven approach to investigate the clinical messages communicated by their healthcare providers, the messaging patterns, topics they communicated, and the extent to which these factors are affiliated with discontinuation to a recommended 5-year treatment protocol. Our findings suggest that notification of unread messages, plan...
Source: AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings - Category: Bioinformatics Tags: AMIA Annu Symp Proc Source Type: research