Analysis of Critical Incident Reports Using Natural Language Processing

A Critical Incident Reporting System (CIRS) collects anecdotal reports from employees, which serve as a vital source of information about incidents that could potentially harm patients.
Objectives: To demonstrate how natural language processing (NLP) methods can help in retrieving valuable information from such incident data.
Methods: We analyzed frequently occurring terms and sentiments as well as topics in data from the Swiss National CIRRNET database from 2006 to 2023 using NLP and BERTopic modelling.
Results: We grouped the topics into 10 major themes out of which 6 are related to medication. Overall, they reflect the global trends in adverse events in healthcare (surgical errors, venous thromboembolism, falls). Additionally, we identified errors related to blood testing, COVID-19, handling patients with diabetes and pediatrics. 40-50% of the messages are written in a neutral tone, 30-40% in a negative tone.
Conclusion: The analysis of CIRS messages using text analysis tools helped in getting insights into common sources of critical incidents in Swiss healthcare institutions. In future work, we want to study more closely the relations, for example between sentiment and topics.