Identifying statements related to suicidal behaviour in psychiatric electronic health records (EHRs) is an important step when modeling that behaviour, and when assessing suicide risk. We apply a deep neural network based classification model with a lightweight context encoder, to classify sentence level suicidal behaviour in EHRs. We show that incorporating information from sentences to left and right of the target sentence significantly improves classification accuracy. Our approach achieved the best performance when classifying suicidal behaviour in Autism Spectrum Disorder patient records. The results could have implications for suicidality research and clinical surveillance.

Free text fields within electronic health records (EHRs) contain valuable clinical information which is often missed when conducting research using EHR databases. One such type of information is medications which are not always available in structured fields, especially in mental health records. Most use cases that require medication information also generally require the associated temporal information (e.g. current or past) and attributes (e.g. dose, route, frequency). The purpose of this study is to develop a corpus of medication annotations in mental health records. The aim is to provide a more complete picture behind the mention of medications in the health records, by including additional contextual information around them, and to create a resource for use when developing and evaluating applications for the extraction of medications from EHR text. Thus far, an analysis of temporal information related to medications mentioned in a sample of mental health records has been conducted. The purpose of this analysis was to understand the complexity of medication mentions and their associated temporal information in the free text of EHRs, with a specific focus on the mental health domain.

Text classification tasks which aim at harvesting and/or organizing information from electronic health records are pivotal to support clinical and translational research. However these present specific challenges compared to other classification tasks, notably due to the particular nature of the medical lexicon and language used in clinical records. Recent advances in embedding methods have shown promising results for several clinical tasks, yet there is no exhaustive comparison of such approaches with other commonly used word representations and classification models. In this work, we analyse the impact of various word representations, text pre-processing and classification algorithms on the performance of four different text classification tasks. The results show that traditional approaches, when tailored to the specific language and structure of the text inherent to the classification task, can achieve or exceed the performance of more recent ones based on contextual embeddings such as BERT.