Patients with cancer often have unmet psychosocial needs. Early detection of who requires referral to a counsellor or psychiatrist may improve their care. This study used natural language processing to predict which patients will see a counsellor or psychiatrist from a patient’s initial oncology consultation document. Results show balanced accuracy of 73.1% for predicting psychiatrist visits and 71.0% for counselor visits. This is believed to be the first use of AI to predict psychiatric outcomes from non-psychiatric medical documents.
This groundbreaking study demonstrates that artificial intelligence can predict psychosocial needs of cancer patients by analyzing initial oncology consultation documents. Different linguistic patterns predict psychiatrist versus counselor referrals, providing clinically relevant insights for patient care.