Linking free text documentation of functioning and disability to the ICF with natural language processing

Background: Invaluable information on patient functioning and the complex interactions that define it is recorded in free text portions of the Electronic Health Record (EHR). Leveraging this information to improve clinical decision-making and conduct research requires natural language processing (NLP) technologies to identify and organize the information recorded in clinical documentation.

Methods: We used natural language processing methods to analyze information about patient functioning recorded in two collections of clinical documents pertaining to claims for federal disability benefits from the U.S. Social Security Administration (SSA). We grounded our analysis in the International Classification of Functioning, Disability, and Health (ICF), and used the Activities and Participation domain of the ICF to classify information about functioning in three key areas: mobility, self-care, and domestic life. After annotating functional status information in our datasets through expert clinical review, we trained machine learning-based NLP models to automatically assign ICF categories to mentions of functional activity.

Results: We found that rich and diverse information on patient functioning was documented in the free text records. Annotation of 289 documents for Mobility information yielded 2,455 mentions of Mobility activities and 3,176 specific actions corresponding to 13 ICF-based categories. Annotation of 329 documents for Self-Care and Domestic Life information yielded 3,990 activity mentions and 4,665 specific actions corresponding to 16 ICF-based categories. NLP systems for automated ICF coding achieved over 80% macro-averaged F-measure on both datasets, indicating strong performance across all ICF categories used.

Conclusions: Natural language processing can help to navigate the tradeoff between flexible and expressive clinical documentation of functioning and standardizable data for comparability and learning. The ICF has practical limitations for classifying functional status information in clinical documentation but presents a valuable framework for organizing the information recorded in health records about patient functioning. This study advances the development of robust, ICF-based NLP technologies to analyze information on patient functioning and has significant implications for NLP-powered analysis of functional status information in disability benefits management, clinical care, and research.