HomeNews & TopicsResearchNursing notes can help indicate whether ICU patients will survive

Nursing notes can help indicate whether ICU patients will survive

Published on

Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that sentiments in the nursing notes of health care providers are good indicators of whether intensive care unit (ICU) patients will survive.

Hospitals typically use severity of illness scores to predict the 30-day survival of ICU patients. These scores include lab results, vital signs, and physiological and demographic characteristics gathered within 24 hours of admission.

“The physiological information collected in those first 24 hours of a patient’s ICU stay is really good at predicting 30-day mortality,” said Joel Dubin, an associate professor in the Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science and the School of Public Health and Health Systems. “But maybe we shouldn’t just focus on the objective components of a patient’s health status. It turns out that there is some added predictive value to including nursing notes as opposed to excluding them.”

The researchers used the large publicly available intensive care unit (ICU) database, Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III, containing patient data between 2001 and 2012. After some inclusion and exclusion criteria were considered, such as the need for at least one nursing note for a given patient, the dataset used in the analysis included details about more than 27,000 patients, as well as the nursing notes. The researchers applied an open-source sentiment analysis algorithm to extract adjectives in the text to establish whether it is a positive, neutral or negative statement. A multiple logistic regression model was then fit to the data to show a relationship between the measured sentiment and 30-day mortality while controlling for gender, type of ICU, and simplified acute physiology score.

New cardiac mapping catheter cuts surgery time

The sentiment analysis provided a noticeable improvement for predicting 30-day mortality in the multiple logistic regression model for this group of patients. There was also a clear difference between the patients with the most positive messages who experienced the highest survival rates and the patients with the most negative messages who experienced the lowest survival rates.

“Mortality is not the only outcome that nursing notes could potentially predict,” said Dubin. “They might also be used to predict readmission, or recovery from infection while in the ICU.”

The study, Sentiment in nursing notes as an indicator of out-of-hospital mortality in intensive care patients, co-authored by Dubin and his collaborators, Ian Waudby-Smith, Nam Tran, and Joon Lee, all of the University of Waterloo, was published recently in the journal PLoS ONE.

Latest articles

Common drug interactions with over-the-counter medications

TJ, a 45-year-old male with symptoms of a common cold (sore throat, headache, runny...

Easing the Transition to the Cloud. Modernizing made simple with integration support.

Across Canada, most hospitals and healthcare authorities recognize the need to modernize their systems....

Rovolutionizing geriatric care: Meet Canada’s leading Universal Health Hub (UHH)

Universal Health Hub (UHH) is the only Health Care Organization in Canada which is...

National efforts to guide safe, effective, and equitable use of opioids for quality pain management in children

No one should experience untreated pain. Yet, in Canada, two out of three children...

More like this

The Connector

In a world where an implantable electrode can reduce the number and intensity of...

How AI can reduce turn around times for clinical trial contracts

Unity Health Toronto is one of the first hospitals in Canada to work with...

Navigating the fallout: 23andMe’s data breach and the ethics of consumer genetic testing

By unlocking secrets encrypted within our DNA, genetic testing has become a powerful tool,...

Obesity a risk factor for stillbirth, especially at term

Obesity is a risk factor for stillbirth, and the risk increases as pregnancy advances...

Researching a new treatment for sepsis

For people who are in the intensive care unit (ICU) with a serious health...

Health care inequities behind shorter life spans for Inuit from Nunavik, Quebec, with lung cancer

People living in the Inuit region of Nunavik in northern Quebec die earlier after...