ADEPt, a semantically-enriched pipeline for extracting adverse drug events from free-text electronic health records

Adverse drug events (ADEs) are unintended responses to medical treatment. They can greatly affect a patient’s quality of life and present a substantial burden on healthcare. Although Electronic health records (EHRs) document a wealth of information relating to ADEs, they are frequently stored in the unstructured or semi-structured free-text narrative requiring Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to mine the relevant information. Here we present a rule-based ADE detection and classification pipeline built and tested on a large Psychiatric corpus comprising 264k patients using the de-identified EHRs of four UK-based psychiatric hospitals. The pipeline uses characteristics specific to Psychiatric EHRs to guide the annotation process, and distinguishes: a) the temporal value associated with the ADE mention (whether it is historical or present), b) the categorical value of the ADE (whether it is assertive, hypothetical, retrospective or a general discussion) and c) the implicit contextual value where the status of the ADE is deduced from surrounding indicators, rather than explicitly stated. We manually created the rulebase in collaboration with clinicians and pharmacists by studying ADE mentions in various types of clinical notes. We evaluated the open-source Adverse Drug Event annotation Pipeline (ADEPt) using 19 ADEs specific to antipsychotics and antidepressants medication. The ADEs chosen vary in severity, regularity and persistence. The average F-measure and accuracy achieved by our tool across all tested ADEs were 0.83 and 0.83 respectively. In addition to annotation power, the ADEPT pipeline presents an improvement to the state of the art context-discerning algorithm, ConText.