Toward Understanding Clinical Context of Medication Change Events in Clinical Narratives

Understanding medication events in clinical narratives is essential to achieving a complete picture of a patient's medication history. While prior research has explored classification of medication changes from clinical notes, studies to date have not considered the necessary clinical context needed for their use in real-world applications, such as medication timeline generation and medication reconciliation. In this paper, we present the Contextualized Medication Event Dataset (CMED), a dataset for capturing relevant context of medication changes documented in clinical notes, which was developed using a novel conceptual framework that organizes context for clinical events into various orthogonal dimensions. In this process, we define specific contextual aspects pertinent to medication change events, characterize the dataset, and report the results of preliminary experiments. CMED consists of 9,013 medication mentions annotated over 500 clinical notes, and will be released to the community as a shared task in 2021.