Predicting COVID-19 Symptoms From Free Text in Medical Records Using Artificial Intelligence: Feasibility Study

BACKGROUND: Electronic medical records have opened opportunities to analyze clinical practice at large scale. Structured registries and coding procedures such as the International Classification of Primary Care further improved these procedures. However, a large part of the information about the state of patient and the doctors’ observations is still entered in free text fields. The main function of those fields is to report the doctor’s line of thought, to remind oneself and his or her colleagues on follow-up actions, and to be accountable for clinical decisions. These fields contain rich information that can be complementary to that in coded fields, and until now, they have been hardly used for analysis. OBJECTIVE: This study aims to develop a prediction model to convert the free text information on COVID-19–related symptoms from out of hours care electronic medical records into usable symptom-based data that can be analyzed at large scale. METHODS: The design was a feasibility study in which we examined the content of the raw data, steps and methods for modelling, as well as the precision and accuracy of the models. A data prediction model for 27 preidentified COVID-19–relevant symptoms was developed for a data set derived from the database of primary-care out-of-hours consultations in Flanders. A multiclass, multilabel categorization classifier was developed. We tested two approaches, which were (1) a classical machine learning–based text categorization approach, Binary Relevance, and (2) a deep neural network learning approach with BERTje, including a domain-adapted version. Ethical approval was acquired through the Institutional Review Board of the Institute of Tropical Medicine and the ethics committee of the University Hospital of Antwerpen (ref 20/50/693). RESULTS: The sample set comprised 3957 fields. After cleaning, 2313 could be used for the experiments. Of the 2313 fields, 85% (n=1966) were used to train the model, and 15% (n=347) for testing. The normal BERTje model performed the best on the data. It reached a weighted F1 score of 0.70 and an exact match ratio or accuracy score of 0.38, indicating the instances for which the model has identified all correct codes. The other models achieved respectable results as well, ranging from 0.59 to 0.70 weighted F1. The Binary Relevance method performed the best on the data without a frequency threshold. As for the individual codes, the domain-adapted version of BERTje performs better on several of the less common objective codes, while BERTje reaches higher F1 scores for the least common labels especially, and for most other codes in general. CONCLUSIONS: The artificial intelligence model BERTje can reliably predict COVID-19–related information from medical records using text mining from the free text fields generated in primary care settings. This feasibility study invites researchers to examine further possibilities to use primary care routine data.