NLP · Public health · 2018 – 2019

Text Mining EMS Notes to Improve Opioid Overdose Surveillance in Florida

Applied text mining to EMS clinical notes to sharpen Florida's opioid overdose surveillance, and owned the state's CDC data deliverables for the program.

Epidemiologist · Florida Department of Health

Randolph Schilke

By , Senior AI Engineer
Updated

Public state surveillance reports
7
Presentations to the CDC and national conferences
5
Oral presentations at CSTE 2019
2

Context

I owned data processing and CDC deliverables for Florida's Enhanced State Opioid Overdose Surveillance (ESOOS) program, working with death certificates, hospital records, labs, and EMS records.

What I built

  • SAS code for state- and county-level quarterly non-fatal overdose reports, and for state-level fatal opioid cases with automatic upload into SUDORS.
  • Text mining of EMS clinical notes to extract entities and structure the data, improving syndromic surveillance case definitions and predictive models.
  • Analysis that identified geographically specific, statistically significant changes in non-fatal overdose rates.
Poster: Validating Syndromic Data for Opioid Overdose Surveillance in Florida
Conference poster on validating syndromic data for opioid overdose surveillance.

Results

  • Seven public-facing state surveillance reports.
  • Breakout oral presentation at the 2019 CSTE Annual Conference: "Text Mining Improves Opioid Overdose Syndromic Surveillance in Florida."
  • Findings also presented to the CDC EMS All-State Workgroup, at a CDC reverse site visit, and at the International Society for Disease Surveillance.

Contact

Hiring for ML platform or healthcare AI work?

I'm open to Senior and Staff AI engineering, ML platform, and data science leadership roles, and to healthcare AI consulting. Email is the fastest way to reach me, and I reply personally.

Target roles
Senior or Staff AI Engineer · ML Platform / MLOps Engineer · Data Science Lead
Location
Remote-friendly; based in the Jacksonville, FL area
Work authorization
U.S. citizen
Focus
ML platforms, MLOps, LLMs, and healthcare AI
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