Using Clinical Notes and Medical Codes to Identify Stimulant Use in Hospital Data  

<jats:p>This white paper outlines the methodology used to develop the National Center for Health Statistics Stimulant Algorithm, an analytic resource that uses medical codes and text-based analysis of clinical notes to identify therapeutic and nontherapeutic stimulant use in hospital encounter data. It also describes how the algorithm was evaluated against gold-standard annotated data from the National Hospital Care Survey and summarizes its performance.</jats:p>