Automatic address validation and health record review to identify homeless Social Security disability applicants

Homeless patients face a variety of obstacles in pursuit of basic social services. Acknowledging this, the Social Security Administration directs employees to prioritize homeless patients and handle their disability claims with special care. However, under existing manual processes for identification of homelessness, many homeless patients never receive the special service to which they are entitled. In this paper, we explore address validation and automatic annotation of electronic health records to improve identification of homeless patients.

We developed a sample of claims containing medical records at the moment of arrival in a single office. Using address validation software, we reconciled patient addresses with public directories of homeless shelters, veterans' hospitals and clinics, and correctional facilities. Other tools annotated electronic health records. We trained random forests to identify homeless patients and validated each model with 10-fold cross validation.

For our finished model, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve was 0.942. The random forest improved sensitivity from 0.067 to 0.879 but decreased positive predictive value to 0.382.

Presumed false positive classifications bore many characteristics of homelessness. Organizations could use these methods to prompt early collection of information necessary to avoid labor-intensive attempts to reestablish contact with homeless individuals. Annually, such methods could benefit tens of thousands of patients who are homeless, destitute, and in urgent need of assistance.

We were able to identify many more homeless patients through a combination of automatic address validation and natural language processing of unstructured electronic health records.