Towards Automated Prediction of Goals of Care Conversations in Clinical Notes

Patients articulate their goals, values, and preferences about end-of-life care during goals of care conversations (GOCC), so that their care can be guided by these goals should they become incapacitated and unable to express these preferences for themselves. The problem is that goals of care information can become buried and difficult to find within clinical notes in the medical record. The overall purpose of our project is to automatically identify clinical notes which document GOCCs between patients and their providers.  These conversations are incredibly important for health care providers to make informed decisions regarding their patients and end-of-life care. Automatically identifying these source notes would support health care providers in acting on patient preferences. In the future, we envision building a dashboard or tool in the electronic health record that will gather all the information about patients’ preferences regarding end-of-life care in a single place to support clinician decision-making. This might decrease the time and effort clinicians spend finding this essential information and support patients being the central decision-makers regarding their own care.