Using unstructured data to identify readmitted patients

Readmission rate is a quality metric for hospitals. The electronic medical record is the main source to identify readmitted patients and calculating readmission rates. Difficulties remain in identifying patients readmitted to a facility different than the one performing the procedure. In this study, we assessed the impact of using unstructured data in detecting readmission within 30 days of surgery. We implemented two rule-based systems to recognize any mention of readmission in follow-up phone call conversions. We evaluated our systems on datasets from two hospitals. Our evaluation showed using unstructured data, in addition to structured data, increased sensitivity in the both dataset, from 53 to 81 and 66 to 87 percent.