FairCareNLP: An AI-Driven Patient Review Analyzer for Healthcare

ObjectiveTo develop and evaluate an automatic patient review analyzer that applies advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning methods to improve the efficiency, fairness, and accuracy of healthcare feedback analysis. Materials and MethodsWe designed a multi-component pipeline incorporating sentiment analysis, key theme extraction, clinical Named Entity Recognition (NER), and fairness modules. Bias mitigation was addressed through the integration of three complementary approaches: adversarial debiasing, Hard Debiasing, and Iterative Null-space Projection (INLP). Multiple BERT-based models (DistilBERT, BioBERT, RoBERTa, BERT-base-uncased) were trained and evaluated under varying hyperparameters and fairness/adversarial loss configurations. Model performance was assessed using accuracy, F1, recall, precision, AUC, Equalized Odds (EOD), and Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) metrics. ResultsAdversarial loss ({lambda}adv > 0) consistently decreased model performance across accuracy, F1, precision, and recall. In contrast, Hard Debiasing and INLP improved WEAT scores while preserving or enhancing other metrics, with INLP yielding the best overall performance. Specifically, INLP with fairness loss improved EOD by 14%, gender WEAT scores by 15%, and achieved slight gains for ethnicity and socioeconomic WEAT scores. The best model achieved accuracy of 0.856, F1 score of 0.812, recall of 0.798, AUC of 0.961, and precision of 0.829. The key theme analysis module identified 82% of expert-labeled themes, though 21% of patient comments lacked expert labels for valence or related attributes. DiscussionOur results demonstrate the trade-offs between fairness and performance in bias mitigation strategies. While adversarial debiasing reduced predictive accuracy, INLP and Hard Debiasing improved fairness without significant degradation in task performance. Gender bias proved easier to mitigate than multi-categorical features such as ethnicity and income, underscoring the need for fairness techniques tailored to multi-class sensitive attributes. ConclusionThis work presents a comprehensive NLP pipeline for patient feedback analysis that integrates multiple debiasing strategies, offering an important step toward equitable AI in healthcare. The approach enhances both the fairness and accuracy of insights drawn from unstructured patient reviews, thereby supporting more inclusive patient-centered care.