Identifying symptom groups from Emergency Department presenting complaint free text using SNOMED CT

Patients presenting to Emergency Departments may be categorised into different symptom groups for the purpose of research and quality improvement. The grouping is challenging due to the variability in the way presenting complaints are recorded by clinical staff. This work proposes analysis of the presenting complaint free-text using the semantics encoded in the SNOMED CT ontology. This work demonstrates a validated prototype system that can classify unstructured free-text narratives into patient's symptom group. A rule-based mechanism was developed using variety of keywords to identify the patient's symptom group. The system was validated against the manual identification of the symptom groups by two expert clinical research nurses on 794 patient presentations from six participating hospitals. The comparison of system results with one clinical research nurse showed 99.3% sensitivity; 80.0% specificity and 0.9 F-score for identifying "chest pain" symptom group.