Towards automatic and interpretable assignments of patients presenting with pain to the emergency department

Introduction: Pain is the most common symptom that patients present with to the emergency department. It is hard to identify patients who have presented in pain to the emergency department when compliance with structured pain assessment is low. An ability to identify patients presenting in pain allows further investigation of the quality of care provided. Background: Machine and deep learning techniques are commonly used for text analysis in healthcare. Applications such as the classification of diagnosis and unplanned readmissions from textual medical records have previously been described. In other work, conventional and deep-learning techniques have demonstrated high performance in identifying patients presenting to the emergency department in pain. However, these models have lacked interpretability. Methods: This paper proposes the use of machine learning techniques to identify patients who present in pain based upon their initial assessment using interpretable deep learning models. Results: The interpretable deep learning model of pain identification was shown to have more accuracy and precision than other machine and deep learning techniques. This technique has significant application to large datasets for the identification of the quality of care and real-Time identification of patients presenting in pain to improve their care.