Extraction of Substance Use Information from Clinical Notes: A GPT-Based Investigation (Preprint)

Background Understanding the multifaceted nature of health outcomes requires a comprehensive examination of the social, economic, and environmental determinants that shape individual well-being. Among these determinants, behavioral factors play a crucial role, particularly the consumption patterns of psychoactive substances, which have important implications on public health. The Global Burden of Disease Study shows a growing impact in disability-adjusted life years due to substance use. The successful identification of patients’ substance use information equips clinical care teams to address substance-related issues more effectively, enabling targeted support and ultimately improving patient outcomes. Objective Traditional natural language processing methods face limitations in accurately parsing diverse clinical language associated with substance use. Large language models offer promise in overcoming these challenges by adapting to diverse language patterns. This study investigates the application of the generative pretrained transformer (GPT) model in specific GPT-3.5 for extracting tobacco, alcohol, and substance use information from patient discharge summaries in zero-shot and few-shot learning settings. This study contributes to the evolving landscape of health care informatics by showcasing the potential of advanced language models in extracting nuanced information critical for enhancing patient care. Methods The main data source for analysis in this paper is Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III data set. Among all notes in this data set, we focused on discharge summaries. Prompt engineering was undertaken, involving an iterative exploration of diverse prompts. Leveraging carefully curated examples and refined prompts, we investigate the model’s proficiency through zero-shot as well as few-shot prompting strategies. Results Results show GPT’s varying effectiveness in identifying mentions of tobacco, alcohol, and substance use across learning scenarios. Zero-shot learning showed high accuracy in identifying substance use, whereas few-shot learning reduced accuracy but improved in identifying substance use status, enhancing recall and F1-score at the expense of lower precision. Conclusions Excellence of zero-shot learning in precisely extracting text span mentioning substance use demonstrates its effectiveness in situations in which comprehensive recall is important. Conversely, few-shot learning offers advantages when accurately determining the status of substance use is the primary focus, even if it involves a trade-off in precision. The results contribute to enhancement of early detection and intervention strategies, tailor treatment plans with greater precision, and ultimately, contribute to a holistic understanding of patient health profiles. By integrating these artificial intelligence–driven methods into electronic health record systems, clinicians can gain immediate, comprehensive insights into substance use that results in shaping interventions that are not only timely but also more personalized and effective.