Tavabi Nazgol, Raza Marium, Singh Mallika, Golchin Shahriar, Singh Harsev, Hogue Grant D, Kiapour Ata M
Department of Orthopaedic Surgery and Sports Medicine, Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, MA, USA.
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
NPJ Digit Med. 2023 Aug 8;6(1):138. doi: 10.1038/s41746-023-00885-w.
The legalizations of medical and recreational cannabis have generated a great deal of interest in studying the health impacts of cannabis products. Despite increases in cannabis use, its documentation during clinical visits is not yet mainstream. This lack of information hampers efforts to study cannabis's effects on health outcomes. A clear and in-depth understanding of current trends in cannabis use documentation is necessary to develop proper guidelines to screen and document cannabis use. Here we have developed and used a natural language processing pipeline to evaluate the trends and disparities in cannabis documentation. The pipeline includes a screening step to identify clinical notes with cannabis use documentation which is then fed into a BERT-based classifier to confirm positive use. This pipeline is applied to more than 23 million notes from a large cohort of 370,087 patients seen in a high-volume multi-site pediatric and young adult clinic over a period of 21 years. Our findings show a very low but growing rate of cannabis use documentation (<2%) in electronic health records with significant demographic and socioeconomic disparities in both documentation and positive use, which requires further attention.
医用大麻和娱乐用大麻的合法化引发了人们对研究大麻产品健康影响的浓厚兴趣。尽管大麻使用有所增加,但在临床就诊期间对其进行记录尚未成为主流。信息的缺乏阻碍了研究大麻对健康结果影响的工作。要制定适当的大麻使用筛查和记录指南,就必须对当前大麻使用记录的趋势有清晰而深入的了解。在此,我们开发并使用了一个自然语言处理流程来评估大麻记录中的趋势和差异。该流程包括一个筛查步骤,以识别包含大麻使用记录的临床笔记,然后将其输入基于BERT的分类器以确认阳性使用情况。这个流程应用于来自一个由370,087名患者组成的大型队列的超过2300万份笔记,这些患者在一家高流量的多地点儿科和青年成人诊所就诊,时间跨度为21年。我们的研究结果显示,电子健康记录中大麻使用记录的比例非常低但呈上升趋势(<2%),在记录和阳性使用方面存在显著的人口统计学和社会经济差异,这需要进一步关注。