The ENACT network is acting on housing instability and the unhoused using the open health natural language processing toolkit

Daniel R Harris; Sunyang Fu; Andrew Wen; Alexandria Corbeau; Darren Henderson; Jordan Hilsman; David Oniani; Yanshan Wang

doi:10.1017/cts.2024.543

The ENACT network is acting on housing instability and the unhoused using the open health natural language processing toolkit

J Clin Transl Sci. 2024 May 16;8(1):e98. doi: 10.1017/cts.2024.543. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Daniel R Harris^{1

2}, Sunyang Fu³, Andrew Wen³, Alexandria Corbeau^{1

2}, Darren Henderson^{1

2}, Jordan Hilsman⁴, David Oniani⁴, Yanshan Wang^{4

5

6}

Affiliations

¹ Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA.
² Institute for Biomedical Informatics, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA.
³ Center for Translational AI Excellence and Applications in Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
⁴ Department of Health Information Management, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
⁵ Clinical and Translational Science Institute, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.
⁶ Department of Biomedical Informatics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Abstract

Housing is an environmental social determinant of health that is linked to mortality and clinical outcomes. We developed a lexicon of housing-related concepts and rule-based natural language processing methods for identifying these housing-related concepts within clinical text. We piloted our methods on several test cohorts: a synthetic cohort generated by ChatGPT for initial infrastructure testing, a cohort with substance use disorders (SUD), and a cohort diagnosed with problems related to housing and economic circumstances (HEC). Our methods successfully identified housing concepts in our ChatGPT notes (recall = 1.0, precision = 1.0), our SUD population (recall = 0.9798, precision = 0.9898), and our HEC population (recall = N/A, precision = 0.9160).

Keywords: Housing instability; natural language processing; social determinants of health.