NLP-Based Prediction of Medical Specialties at Hospital Admission Using Triage Notes

Data Analytics is rapidly expanding within the healthcare domain to help develop strategies for improving the quality of care and curbing costs as well. Natural Language Processing (NLP) solutions have received particular attention whereas a large part of clinical data is stockpiled into unstructured physician or nursing notes. In this respect, we attempt to employ NLP to provide an early prediction of the medical specialties at hospital admission. The study uses a large-scale dataset including more than 260K ED records provided by the Amiens-Picardy University Hospital in France. Our approach aims to integrate structured data with unstructured textual notes recorded at the triage stage. On one hand, a standard MLP model is used against the typical set of features. On the other hand, a Convolutional Neural Network is used to operate over the textual data. While both learning components are conducted independently in parallel. The empirical results demonstrated a promising accuracy in general. It is conceived that the study could be an additional contribution to the mounting efforts of applying NLP methods in the healthcare domain.