UNSTRUCTURED
Natural language processing (NLP) in health care enables transformation of complex narrative information into high value products such as clinical decision support and adverse event monitoring in real time via the Electronic Health Record (EHR). However, information technologies for mental health have consistently lagged behind due to the complexity of measuring and modeling mental health and illness. The use of NLP to support management of mental health conditions is a viable topic that has not been explored in depth. This article provides a framework for advancing NLP methods to identify, extract and organize information on mental health and functioning in order to inform the decision-making process applied to assessing mental health. We present a use case related to work disability, guided by the disability determination process of the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). From this perspective the following questions must be addressed about each problem leading to a disability benefits claim: when did the problem occur and how long has it existed? How severe is it? Does it affect the person’s ability to work? What is the source of the evidence about the problem?
Our framework includes four dimensions of medical information that are central to assessing disability — temporal sequence and duration, severity, context, and the information source.
We describe key aspects of each dimension and promising approaches for application in mental functioning. For example, to address temporality, a complete functional timeline must be created with all relevant aspects of functioning such as intermittence, persistence and recurrence. Severity of mental health symptoms can be successfully identified and extracted on a four-level ordinal scale from absent to severe. Some NLP work has been reported on context for specific cases of wheelchair use in clinical settings. We discuss the links between the task of information source assessment and work on source attribution, coreference resolution, event extraction and rule-based methods.
Gaps were identified in NLP applications that directly applied to the framework and in existing relevant annotated datasets. We highlighted NLP methods with potential to be applied to move the field forward in application to mental functioning.
Findings from this work will inform development of instruments developed to support the SSA adjudicators in their disability determination process. The four dimensions of medical information may have relevance for a broad array of individuals and organizations responsible for assessing mental health function and ability. Further, our framework with four specific dimensions presents significant opportunity for application of NLP in the realm of mental health and functioning beyond the SSA setting, and it may support the development of robust tools and methods to support decision-making related to clinical care, program implementation, and other outcomes.