A recent study ( 5) reported that up to 75% of cancers occurrences are associated with SDoH rather than clinical factors. The Healthy People 2030 defined SDoH as “the conditions in the environments where people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age that affect a wide range of health, functioning, and quality-of-life outcomes and risks” and categorized SDoH into 5 domains, including economic stability, education access and quality, healthcare access and quality, neighborhood and built environment, and social and community context ( 4). In recent years, there is an increasing interest in examining how SDoH contribute to cancer risk and treatment outcomes ( 3). This study could guide future studies to better utilize SDoH information documented in clinical narratives.Īs the second leading cause of death in the United States (US) ( 1), cancer has a long list of risk factors, ranging from biological traits to clinical characteristics to social determinants of health (SDoH) ( 2). To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first studies to examine the documentation of SDoH in clinical narratives from a real-world lung cancer patient cohort. We aggregated the SDoH concepts into patient-level and assessed how each of the 15 categories of SDoH were documented in cancer patient's notes.

In this study, we applied a natural language processing (NLP) system to identify 15 categories of SDoH from a total of 10,855 lung cancer patients at the University of Florida Health. There is an increasing interest in exploring SDoH captured in electronic health records (EHRs) to assess cancer risk and outcomes however, most SDoH are only captured in free-text clinical narratives such as physicians' notes that are not readily accessible. Social determinants of health (SDoH) are important factors associated with cancer risk and treatment outcomes. Department of Health Outcomes and Biomedical Informatics, College of Medicine, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, United States.Zehao Yu, Xi Yang, Yi Guo, Jiang Bian and Yonghui Wu *

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