Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Identify Caregiver Availability for Patients with ADRD from Electronic Medical Records

Prior literature has posited that caregiver availability can potentially prevent adverse health events such as hospital readmissions in the ADRD population. Identifying caregiver availability for patients with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia (ADRD) can inform healthcare systems and hospital administrations on appropriate discharge planning. Caregiver availability is an important and influential domain in assessing risk of hospital readmissions. However, caregiver availability data is not systematically collected in our healthcare system. Our main objective was to use medical notes (from physicians, nurses, or social workers) to assess caregiver availability and types of caregivers for hospitalized patients with ADRD.