TY - GEN
T1 - Evaluating pain in intensive care
AU - Suominen, Hanna
AU - Lundgrén-Laine, Heljä
AU - Salanterä, Sanna
AU - Salakoski, Tapio
PY - 2009
Y1 - 2009
N2 - Optimal pain management is essential for good care outcomes, but assessing pain is particularly complex in intensive care, as patients are often unable to communicate. We hypothesize that the task could be supported through human language technology. To evaluate the feasibility of such tools, we study how pain is documented in electronic Finnish free-text intensive care nursing notes by statistically comparing annotations of ten nursing professionals on a set of 1548 documents. The aspects considered include the amount and writing style of pain-related notes, pain intensity, and given pain care. More than half of the documents contained information relevant for patients' pain status but it was expressed usually indirectly. Also pain medication was commented as free-text. Although annotators' pain intensity evaluations diverged, the substantial amount of pain-related notes encourages developing computational tools for pain assessment.
AB - Optimal pain management is essential for good care outcomes, but assessing pain is particularly complex in intensive care, as patients are often unable to communicate. We hypothesize that the task could be supported through human language technology. To evaluate the feasibility of such tools, we study how pain is documented in electronic Finnish free-text intensive care nursing notes by statistically comparing annotations of ten nursing professionals on a set of 1548 documents. The aspects considered include the amount and writing style of pain-related notes, pain intensity, and given pain care. More than half of the documents contained information relevant for patients' pain status but it was expressed usually indirectly. Also pain medication was commented as free-text. Although annotators' pain intensity evaluations diverged, the substantial amount of pain-related notes encourages developing computational tools for pain assessment.
KW - Computerized patient records
KW - Decision-making
KW - Intensive care
KW - Natural language processing
KW - Pain
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=70349574425&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.3233/978-1-60750-024-7-192
DO - 10.3233/978-1-60750-024-7-192
M3 - Conference contribution
C2 - 19592833
AN - SCOPUS:70349574425
SN - 9781607500247
T3 - Studies in Health Technology and Informatics
SP - 192
EP - 196
BT - Connecting Health and Humans - Proceedings of NI2009
PB - IOS Press
T2 - 10th International Congress on Nursing Informatics: Connecting Health and Humans, NI2009
Y2 - 28 June 2009 through 1 July 2009
ER -