An automated pipeline for analyzing medication event reports in clinical settings

BACKGROUND: Medication events in clinical settings are significant threats to patient safety. Analyzing and learning from the medication event reports is an important way to prevent the recurrence of these events. Currently, the analysis of medication event reports is ineffective and requires heavy workloads for clinicians. An automated pipeline is proposed to help clinicians deal with the accumulated reports, extract valuable information and generate feedback from the reports. Thus, the strategy of medication event prevention can be further developed based on the lessons learned. METHODS: In order to build the automated pipeline, four classic machine learning classifiers (i.e., support vector machine, Naïve Bayes, random forest, and multi-layer perceptron) were compared to identify the event originating stages, event types, and event causes from the medication event reports. The precision, recall and F-1 measure were calculated to assess the performance of the classifiers. Further, a strategy to measure the similarity of medication event reports in our pipeline was established and evaluated by human subjects through a questionnaire. RESULTS: We developed three classifiers to identify the medication event originating stages, event types and causes, respectively. For the event originating stages, a support vector machine classifier obtains the best performance with an F-1 measure of 0.792. For the event types, a support vector machine classifier exhibits the best performance with an F-1 measure of 0.758. And for the event causes, a random forest classifier reaches an F-1 measure of 0.925. The questionnaire results show that the similarity measurement is consistent with the domain experts in the task of identifying similar reports. CONCLUSION: We developed and evaluated an automated pipeline that could identify three attributes from the medication event reports and calculate the similarity scores between the reports based on the attributes. The pipeline is expected to improve the efficiency of analyzing the medication event reports and to learn from the reports in a timely manner. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1186/s12911-018-0687-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.