2021 Articles

Extracting social determinants of health from electronic health records using natural language processing: a systematic review

Patra, Braja G; Sharma, Mohit M; Vekaria, Veer; Adekkanattu, Prakash; Patterson, Olga V; Glicksberg, Benjamin; Lepow, Lauren A; Ryu, Euijung; Furmanchuk, Al’ona; George, Thomas J; Hogan, William; Wu, Yonghui; Yang, Xi; Bian, Jiang; Weissman, Myrna M.; Wickramaratne, Priya; Mann, J John

Objective: Social determinants of health (SDoH) are nonclinical dispositions that impact patient health risks and clinical outcomes. Leveraging SDoH in clinical decision-making can potentially improve diagnosis, treatment planning, and patient outcomes. Despite increased interest in capturing SDoH in electronic health records (EHRs), such information is typically locked in unstructured clinical notes. Natural language processing (NLP) is the key technology to extract SDoH information from clinical text and expand its utility in patient care and research. This article presents a systematic review of the state-of-the-art NLP approaches and tools that focus on identifying and extracting SDoH data from unstructured clinical text in EHRs.