TY - JOUR
T1 - Predicting Patient Satisfaction With Medications for Treating Opioid Use Disorder
T2 - Case Study Applying Natural Language Processing to Reviews of Methadone and Buprenorphine/Naloxone on Health-Related Social Media
AU - Omranian, Samaneh
AU - Zolnoori, Maryam
AU - Huang, Ming
AU - Campos-Castillo, Celeste
AU - McRoy, Susan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 JMIR Publications Inc. All rights reserved.
PY - 2023
Y1 - 2023
N2 - Background: Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is an effective method for treating opioid use disorder (OUD), which combines behavioral therapies with one of three Food and Drug Administration–approved medications: methadone, buprenorphine, and naloxone. While MAT has been shown to be effective initially, there is a need for more information from the patient perspective about the satisfaction with medications. Existing research focuses on patient satisfaction with the entirety of the treatment, making it difficult to determine the unique role of medication and overlooking the views of those who may lack access to treatment due to being uninsured or concerns over stigma. Studies focusing on patients’ perspectives are also limited by the lack of scales that can efficiently collect self-reports across domains of concerns. Objective: A broad survey of patients’ viewpoints can be obtained through social media and drug review forums, which are then assessed using automated methods to discover factors associated with medication satisfaction. Because the text is unstructured, it may contain a mix of formal and informal language. The primary aim of this study was to use natural language processing methods on text posted on health-related social media to detect patients’ satisfaction with two well-studied OUD medications: methadone and buprenorphine/naloxone. Methods: We collected 4353 patient reviews of methadone and buprenorphine/naloxone from 2008 to 2021 posted on WebMD and Drugs.com. To build our predictive models for detecting patient satisfaction, we first employed different analyses to build four input feature sets using the vectorized text, topic models, duration of treatment, and biomedical concepts by applying MetaMap. We then developed six prediction models: logistic regression, Elastic Net, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, random forest classifier, Ridge classifier, and extreme gradient boosting to predict patients’ satisfaction. Lastly, we compared the prediction models’ performance over different feature sets. Results: Topics discovered included oral sensation, side effects, insurance, and doctor visits. Biomedical concepts included symptoms, drugs, and illnesses. The F-score of the predictive models across all methods ranged from 89.9% to 90.8%. The Ridge classifier model, a regression-based method, outperformed the other models. Conclusions: Assessment of patients’ satisfaction with opioid dependency treatment medication can be predicted using automated text analysis. Adding biomedical concepts such as symptoms, drug name, and illness, along with the duration of treatment and topic models, had the most benefits for improving the prediction performance of the Elastic Net model compared to other models. Some of the factors associated with patient satisfaction overlap with domains covered in medication satisfaction scales (eg, side effects) and qualitative patient reports (eg, doctors’ visits), while others (insurance) are overlooked, thereby underscoring the value added from processing text on online health forums to better understand patient adherence.
AB - Background: Medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is an effective method for treating opioid use disorder (OUD), which combines behavioral therapies with one of three Food and Drug Administration–approved medications: methadone, buprenorphine, and naloxone. While MAT has been shown to be effective initially, there is a need for more information from the patient perspective about the satisfaction with medications. Existing research focuses on patient satisfaction with the entirety of the treatment, making it difficult to determine the unique role of medication and overlooking the views of those who may lack access to treatment due to being uninsured or concerns over stigma. Studies focusing on patients’ perspectives are also limited by the lack of scales that can efficiently collect self-reports across domains of concerns. Objective: A broad survey of patients’ viewpoints can be obtained through social media and drug review forums, which are then assessed using automated methods to discover factors associated with medication satisfaction. Because the text is unstructured, it may contain a mix of formal and informal language. The primary aim of this study was to use natural language processing methods on text posted on health-related social media to detect patients’ satisfaction with two well-studied OUD medications: methadone and buprenorphine/naloxone. Methods: We collected 4353 patient reviews of methadone and buprenorphine/naloxone from 2008 to 2021 posted on WebMD and Drugs.com. To build our predictive models for detecting patient satisfaction, we first employed different analyses to build four input feature sets using the vectorized text, topic models, duration of treatment, and biomedical concepts by applying MetaMap. We then developed six prediction models: logistic regression, Elastic Net, least absolute shrinkage and selection operator, random forest classifier, Ridge classifier, and extreme gradient boosting to predict patients’ satisfaction. Lastly, we compared the prediction models’ performance over different feature sets. Results: Topics discovered included oral sensation, side effects, insurance, and doctor visits. Biomedical concepts included symptoms, drugs, and illnesses. The F-score of the predictive models across all methods ranged from 89.9% to 90.8%. The Ridge classifier model, a regression-based method, outperformed the other models. Conclusions: Assessment of patients’ satisfaction with opioid dependency treatment medication can be predicted using automated text analysis. Adding biomedical concepts such as symptoms, drug name, and illness, along with the duration of treatment and topic models, had the most benefits for improving the prediction performance of the Elastic Net model compared to other models. Some of the factors associated with patient satisfaction overlap with domains covered in medication satisfaction scales (eg, side effects) and qualitative patient reports (eg, doctors’ visits), while others (insurance) are overlooked, thereby underscoring the value added from processing text on online health forums to better understand patient adherence.
KW - MetaMap
KW - drug review
KW - machine learning
KW - online forums
KW - opioid treatment, opioid use disorder
KW - patient-generated text
KW - text classification
KW - topic modeling
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U2 - 10.2196/37207
DO - 10.2196/37207
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85151867253
SN - 2564-1891
VL - 3
JO - JMIR Infodemiology
JF - JMIR Infodemiology
M1 - e37207
ER -