Impact of COVID-19 on psychiatric assessment in emergency and outpatient settings measured using electronic health records

Victor M. Castro; Roy H Perlis

Presence of individual symptoms was determined by identifying presence of tokens curated by application of a previously-described method for estimating transdiagnostic neuropsychiatric phenotypes via natural language processing (NLP). 13 This method utilizes an expert-curated set of tokens associated with NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) domains, included terms drawn from the RDoC Workgroup statements, and expanded to include synonyms commonly found in health care notes. These estimated RDoC domain scores have been validated against clinician review, and shown to predict longitudinal outcomes among psychiatric and non-psychiatric populations 14, 15 . For the present study, token lists were drawn from the appropriate domain(s) to reflect depression, anxiety, suicide, and psychosis. While not necessarily reflecting psychiatric symptoms, tokens capturing violence were also drawn from this set.