Evidence map›Paper›PMID 40700678›Full record

ArticleJCO clinical cancer informatics2025

Extraction of Social Determinants of Health From Electronic Health Records Using Natural Language Processing.

Zhenghua Chen, Patricia Lasserre, Angela Lin, Rasika Rajapakshe

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in JCO clinical cancer informatics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
3citing papers in PubMed, 1 pooled it
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.

  1. Pooled it
  2. Comparing LLM and Fine-Tuned Model Performance on NVDRS Circumstance Extraction with Varying Prompt Complexity.Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics · 2026
    Article
  3. Using reasoning LLMs to extract SDOH events from clinical notes.Proceedings. IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics · 2026
    Article
4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

4 authors.

Zhenghua ChenBC Cancer Kelowna, Kelowna, Canada.ORCID 0009-0009-7034-6430
Patricia LasserreComputer Science, University of British Columbia-Okanagan, Kelowna, Canada.ORCID 0000-0001-7080-2437
Angela LinBC Cancer Kelowna, Kelowna, Canada.ORCID 0000-0002-0611-539X
Rasika RajapaksheBC Cancer Kelowna, Kelowna, Canada.ORCID 0000-0003-2149-7274

Funding

No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.

6 · The paper itself

Abstract

purposeSocial Determinants of Health (SDoH) have a significant effect on health outcomes and inequalities. SDoH can be extracted from electronic health records (EHR) to aid policy development and research to improve population health. Automated extraction using artificial intelligence (AI) can improve efficiency and cost-effectiveness. The focus of this study was to autonomously extract comprehensive SDoH details from EHR using a natural language processing (NLP)-based AI pipeline. MATERIALS AND

methodsA curated set of 1,000 BC Cancer clinical documents with concentrated SDoH information served as the reference standard for training and evaluating NLP models. Two pipelines were used: an open-source pipeline trained on the annotated medical documents and an industrial pretrained solution used as a benchmark. Three experiments optimized the first pipeline's performance, assessing the effect of including subtype word positions during training. The superior open-source pipeline was then used to extract SDoH information from 13,258 oncology documents.

resultsThe open-source pipeline achieved an average F1 score accuracy of 0.88 on the validation data set for extracting 13 SDoH factors, surpassing the benchmark by 5%. It excelled in detailed subtype extraction, while the benchmark performed better in identifying rarely annotated SDoH information in BC Cancer data set. Overall, 60,717 SDoH factors and associated details were extracted from BC Cancer EHR oncology documents. The most frequently extracted SDoH factors included tobacco use, employment status, marital status, alcohol consumption, and living status, occurring between 8k to 12k times.

conclusionThis study demonstrates the potential of an NLP pipeline to extract SDoH factors from clinical notes, with strong performance on limited data, although data set-specific adjustments are needed for broader application across institutions.

Indexed as

Data MiningElectronic Health RecordsNatural Language ProcessingSocial Determinants of HealthArtificial IntelligenceHumans

Identifiers

PMID40700678
PMCPMC12309507

What OpenQuestion holds

Textmetadata
LicenceCC BY-NC-ND
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Registered trials

None linked

Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.