Whole-person functional limitations in the areas of mobility, self-care and domestic life affect a majority of individuals with disabilities. Detecting, recording and monitoring such limitations would benefit those individuals, as well as research on whole-person functioning and general public health. Dictionaries of terms related to whole-person function would enable automated identification and extraction of relevant information. However, no such terminologies currently exist, due in part to a lack of standardized coding and their availability mainly in free text clinical notes. In this paper, we introduce terminologies of whole-person function in the domains of mobility, self-care and domestic life, built and evaluated using a small set of manually annotated clinical notes, which provided a seedset that was expanded using a mix of lexical and deep learning approaches.

The disability benefits programs administered by the US Social Security Administration (SSA) receive between 2 and 3 million new applications each year. Adjudicators manually review hundreds of evidence pages per case to determine eligibility based on financial, medical, and functional criteria. Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is uniquely suited to support this adjudication work and is a critical component of an ongoing inter-agency collaboration between SSA and the National Institutes of Health. This NLP work provides resources and models for document ranking, named entity recognition, and terminology extraction in order to automatically identify documents and reports pertinent to a case, and to allow adjudicators to search for and locate desired information quickly. In this paper, we describe our vision for how NLP can impact SSA’s adjudication process, present the resources and models that have been developed, and discuss some of the benefits and challenges in working with large-scale government data, and its specific properties in the functional domain.