JAMIA Open • Vol 8 • No 3
Evaluation of falls detected by natural language processing algorithm and not coded external cause of morbidity
May 2025 • Daniel J Hekman, Apoorva Maru, Hanna J. Barton, Douglas A. Wiegmann, Manish N. Shah, Amy L. Cochran, Erkin Ötleş, Brian W. Patterson
Abstract Objective Falls are a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among older adults. Common methods for identifying fall-related ED visits within both claims and electronic health record datasets rely on diagnosis code-based definitions, which underestimate the true prevalence of falls. This study applies a natural language processing (NLP) algorithm to ED provider notes to identify patients presenting due to falls and compares the characteristics of NLP-identified cases to those identified through diagnosi…