Modeling Clinical Context: Rediscovering the Social History and Evaluating Language from the Clinic to the Wards

Social, behavioral, and cultural factors are clearly linked to health and disease outcomes. The medical social history is a critical evaluation of these factors performed by healthcare providers with patients in both inpatient and outpatient care settings. Physicians learn the topics covered in the social history through education and practice, but the topics discussed and documented in real-world clinical narrative have not been described at scale. This study applies large-scale automated topic modeling techniques to discover common topics discussed in social histories, to compare those topics to the medical textbook representation of those histories, and to compare topics between clinical settings to illustrate differences of clinical context on narrative content. Language modeling techniques are used to consider the extent to which inpatient and outpatient social histories share in their language use. Our findings highlight the fact that clinical context and setting are distinguishing factors for social history documentation, as the language of the hospital wards is not the same as that of the ambulatory clinic. Moreover, providers receive little feedback on the quality of their documentation beyond that needed for billing processes. The findings in this study demonstrate a number of topics described in textbooks – schooling, religion, alternative health practices, stressors, for example - do not appear in social histories in either clinical setting.