The Text Mining Technique Applied to the Analysis of Health Interventions to Combat Congenital Syphilis in Brazil: The Case of the "Syphilis No!" Project

Congenital syphilis (CS) remains a threat to public health worldwide, especially in developing countries. To mitigate the impacts of the CS epidemic, the Brazilian government has developed a national intervention project called "Syphilis No." Thus, among its range of actions is the production of thousands of writings featuring the experiences of research and intervention supporters (RIS) of the project, called field researchers. In addition, this large volume of base data was subjected to analysis through data mining, which may contribute to better strategies for combating syphilis. Natural language processing is a form of knowledge extraction. First, the database extracted from the "LUES Platform" with 4,874 documents between 2018 and 2020 was employed. This was followed by text preprocessing, selecting texts referring to the field researchers' reports for analysis. Finally, for analyzing the documents, N-grams extraction (N = 2,3,4) was performed. The combination of the TF-IDF metric with the BoW algorithm was applied to assess terms' importance and frequency and text clustering. In total, 1019 field activity reports were mined. Word extraction from the text mining method set out the following guiding axioms from the bigrams: "confronting syphilis in primary health care;" "investigation committee for congenital syphilis in the territory;" "municipal plan for monitoring and investigating syphilis cases through health surveillance;" "women's healthcare networks for syphilis in pregnant;" "diagnosis and treatment with a focus on rapid testing." Text mining may serve public health research subjects when used in parallel with the conventional content analysis method. The computational method extracted intervention activities from field researchers, also providing inferences on how the strategies of the "Syphilis No" Project influenced the decrease in congenital syphilis cases in the territory

Interventions of Brazil's more doctors program through continuing education for Primary Health Care

IntroductionBrazil's More Doctors Program, in its training axis, aims to improve medical training for Primary Health Care through interventions related to the reality of the territory. The research presented here analyzed the interventions implemented by Brazil's More Doctors Program physicians, members of the Family Health Continuing Education Program, and the relationship with Primary Health Care programmatic actions.MethodologyThe research conducted made use of Text and Data Mining and content analysis. In total, 2,159 reports of interventions from 942 final papers were analyzed. The analysis process was composed of the formation of the corpus; exploration of the materials through text mining; and analysis of the results by inference and interpretation.ResultsIt was observed that 57% of the physicians worked in the Northeast Region, which was also the region with the most interventions (66.8%). From the analysis of the bigrams, trigrams, and quadrigrams, four constructs were formed: “women's health,” “child health,” “chronic non-communicable diseases,” and “mental health.” Terms related to improving access, quality of care, teamwork, and reception were also present among the N-grams.DiscussionThe interventions carried out are under the programmatic actions recommended by the Brazilian Ministry of Health for Primary Health Care, also addressing cross-cutting aspects such as Reception, Teamwork, Access Improvement, and Quality of Care, which suggests that the training experience in the Family Health Continuing Education Program reflects on the way these professionals act