Enhancing Disability Determination Decision Process Through Natural Language Processing

Abstract

In this article, a new approach is introduced that makes use of the valuable information that can be extracted from a patient's electronic healthcare records (EHRs). The approach employs natural language processing and biomedical text mining to handle patient's data. The developed approach extracts relevant medical entities and builds relations between symptoms and other clinical signature modifiers. The extracted features are viewed as evaluation features. The approach utilizes such evaluation features to decide whether an applicant could gain disability benefits or not. Evaluations showed that the proposed approach accurately extracts symptoms and other laboratory marks with high F-measures (93.5-95.6%). Also, results showed an excellent deduction in assessments to approve or reject an applicant case to obtain a disability benefit.