Using nursing notes to improve clinical outcome prediction in intensive care patients: A retrospective cohort study

Electronic health record documentation by intensive care unit (ICU) clinicians may predict patient outcomes. However, it is unclear whether physician and nursing notes differ in their ability to predict short-term ICU prognosis. We aimed to investigate and compare the ability of physician and nursing notes, written in the first 48 hours of admission, to predict ICU length of stay and mortality using 3 analytical methods.

This was a retrospective cohort study with split sampling for model training and testing. We included patients ≥18 years of age admitted to the ICU at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, from 2008 to 2012. Physician or nursing notes generated within the first 48 hours of admission were used with standard machine learning methods to predict outcomes.

For the primary outcome of composite score of ICU length of stay ≥7 days or in-hospital mortality, the gradient boosting model had better performance than the logistic regression and random forest models. Nursing and physician notes achieved area under the curves (AUCs) of 0.826 and 0.796, respectively, with even better predictive power when combined (AUC, 0.839).

Models using only nursing notes more accurately predicted short-term prognosis than did models using only physician notes, but in combination, the models achieved the greatest accuracy in prediction.

Our findings demonstrate that statistical models derived from text analysis in the first 48 hours of ICU admission can predict patient outcomes. Physicians' and nurses' notes are both uniquely important in mortality prediction and combining these notes can produce a better predictive model.