Supporting the capture of social needs through natural language processing

Social factors impact morbidity and mortality among patients. Documenting social needs in the clinical notes is currently widely done by family physicians. The unstructured format of information on social factors in electronic health records limits the ability of providers to address these issues. A proposed solution is using natural language processing to identify social needs from the electronic health record. This could support physicians in capturing structured social needs information that is consistent and reproducible without increasing documentation burden.