Journal of palliative medicine
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Alone, administrative data poorly identifies patients with palliative care needs. ⋯ Adding NLP to the use of administrative codes allows for rapid identification of seriously ill patients with otherwise difficult to detect disease processes and eliminates costly, tedious, and time-intensive manual chart review. This method enables studies to evaluate the effectiveness of treatment, including palliative interventions, for unique populations of seriously ill patients who cannot be identified by administrative codes alone.
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Palliative surgical procedures are frequently performed to reduce symptoms in patients with advanced cancer, but quality is difficult to measure. ⋯ NLP offers opportunities to identify patients receiving palliative surgical procedures and can rapidly assess established end-of-life process measures with an accuracy approaching that of human coders.
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Despite real needs, very few chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) patients with life-limiting disease receive a well-organized support for palliative care (PC). ⋯ Tele-assisted PC is feasible and well accepted. According to these observations, a suitable supportive program can be the goal of a future study.