Harnessing Natural Language Processing to Measure Person-Centered Care in Behavioral Health Settings

Principal Investigator: Dr. Victoria Stanhope (PI), Professor, NYU Silver School of Social Work.

Collaborators: Dr. Elizabeth Matthews, Dr. Sarah Shugars

Dates of award: 9/1/2021 – 8/31/2022

Amount of award: $70,500

Study description: Service disengagement is a persistent and widespread problem within the mental health system. One solution for the problem of service disengagement is to deliver person-centered care (PCC), which ensures that care is individualized and service users are active empowered partners in their treatment. This study will use an innovative artificial intelligence approach to examine Collaborative Documentation, a strategy to promote PCC in behavioral health clinics in which clinicians complete visit notes jointly with consumers during the session. The study will use natural language processing, a text mining technique that translates narrative text to structured data using an algorithm to analyze clinical visit notes. This research study will contribute to the evidence base on Collaborative Documentation and develop an algorithm to analyze PCC to inform quality improvement in behavioral health care.

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