Differences among Research Domain Criteria score trajectories by Diagnostic and Statistical Manual categorical diagnosis during inpatient hospitalization

With brief psychiatric hospitalizations, the extent to which symptoms change is rarely characterized. We sought to understand symptomatic changes across Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) dimensions, and the extent to which such improvement might be associated with risk for readmission. We identified 3,634 individuals with 4,713 hospital admissions to the psychiatric inpatient unit of a large academic medical center between 2010 and 2015. We applied a natural language processing tool to extract estimates of the five RDoC domains to the admission note and discharge summary and calculated the change in each domain. We examined the extent to which symptom domains changed during admission, and their relationship to baseline clinical and sociodemographic features, using linear regression. Symptomatic worsening was rare in the negative valence (0.4%) and positive valence (5.1%) domains, but more common in cognition (25.8%). Most diagnoses exhibited improvement in negative valence, which was associated with significant reduction in readmission risk. Despite generally brief hospital stays, we detected reduction across multiple symptom domains, with greatest improvement in negative symptoms, and greatest probability of worsening in cognitive symptoms. This approach should facilitate investigations of other features or interventions which may influence pace of clinical improvement.