Speech recognition can help evaluate shared decision making and predict medication adherence in primary care setting

Objective: Asthma is a common chronic illness affecting 19 million US adults. Inhaled corticosteroids are a safe and effective treatment for asthma, yet, medication adherence among patients remains poor. Shared decision-making, a patient activation strategy, can improve patient adherence to inhaled corticosteroids. This study aimed to explore whether audio-recorded patient-primary care provider encounters can be used to: 1. Evaluate the level of patient-perceived shared decision-making during the encounter, and 2. Predict levels of patient’s inhaled corticosteroid adherence. Materials and methods: Shared decision-making and inhaled corticosteroid adherence were assessed using the SDM Questionnaire-9 and the Medication Adherence Report Scale for Asthma (MARS-A). Speech-to-text algorithms were used to automatically transcribe 80 audio-recorded encounters between primary care providers and asthmatic patients. Machine learning algorithms (Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, Decision Tree) were applied to achieve the study’s predictive goals. Results: The accuracy of automated speech-to-text transcription was relatively high (ROUGE F-score = .9). Machine learning algorithms achieved good predictive performance for shared decision-making (the highest F-score = .88 for the Naive Bayes) and inhaled corticosteroid adherence (the highest F-score = .87 for the Support Vector Machines). Discussion: This was the first study that trained machine learning algorithms on a dataset of audio-recorded patient-primary care provider encounters to successfully evaluate the quality of SDM and predict patient inhaled corticosteroid adherence. Conclusion: Machine learning approaches can help primary care providers identify patients at risk for poor medication adherence and evaluate the quality of care by measuring levels of shared decision-making. Further work should explore the replicability of our results in larger samples and additional health domains.