FedFSA: Hybrid and federated framework for functional status ascertainment across institutions

Introduction Patients' functional status assesses their independence in performing activities of daily living, encompassing basic ADLs (bADL), and more complex instrumental activities (iADL). Existing studies have discovered that patients’ functional status is a strong predictor of health outcomes, particularly in older adults. Much of the functional status information is stored in electronic health records (EHRs) in either semi-structured or free text formats. This underscores the pressing need to leverage computational approaches such as natural language processing (NLP) to accelerate the curation of functional status information. In this study, we introduced FedFSA, a hybrid and federated NLP framework designed to extract functional status information from EHRs across multiple healthcare institutions. Methods The proposed FedFSA comprises four major components: 1) individual sites (clients) with their private local data, 2) a rule-based information extraction (IE) framework for ADL extraction, 3) a BERT model for functional status impairment classification, and 4) a concept normalizer. The framework was implemented using the OHNLP backbone for rule-based IE and open-source Flower and PyTorch library for federated BERT components. For gold standard data generation, we carried out corpus annotation to identify functional status-related expressions based on ICF definitions. Four healthcare institutions were included in the study. To assess FedFSA, we evaluated the performance of category- and institution-specific ADL extraction across different experimental designs. Results The performance for ADL extraction ranges from an F1-score of 0.907 to 0.986 for bADL and 0.825 to 0.951 for iADL across four healthcare sites. The performance for ADL extraction with impairment ranges from an F1-score of 0.722 to 0.954 for bADL and 0.674 to 0.813 for iADL across four healthcare sites. For category-specific ADL extraction, laundry and transferring yielded relatively high performance, while dressing, medication, bathing, and continence achieved moderate-high performance. Conversely, food preparation and toileting showed low performance. Conclusion NLP performance varied across ADL categories and healthcare sites. Federated learning using a FedFSA framework performed higher than non-federated learning for impaired ADL extraction in all healthcare sites. Our study demonstrated the potential of the federated learning framework in functional status extraction and impairment classification in EHRs, exemplifying a large-scale, multi-institutional collaborative effort.