Feasibility of Mental Health Triage Call Priority Prediction Using Machine Learning

Optimum efficiency and responsiveness to callers of mental health helplines can only be achieved if call priority is accurately identified. Currently, call operators making a triage assessment rely heavily on their clinical judgment and experience. Due to the significant morbidity and mortality associated with mental illness, there is an urgent need to identify callers to helplines who have a high level of distress and need to be seen by a clinician who can offer interventions for treatment. This study delves into the potential of using machine learning (ML) to estimate call priority from the properties of the callers' voices rather than evaluating the spoken words.

Phone callers' speech is first isolated using existing APIs, then features or representations are extracted from the raw speech. These are then fed into a series of deep learning neural networks to classify priority level from the audio representation.

Development of a deep learning neural network architecture that instantly determines positive and negative levels in the input speech segments. A total of 459 call records from a mental health helpline were investigated. The final ML model achieved a balanced accuracy of 92% correct identification of both positive and negative instances of call priority.

The priority level provides an estimate of voice quality in terms of positive or negative demeanor that can be simultaneously displayed using a web interface on a computer or smartphone.