From individual EHR maintenance to generalised findings: Experiments for application of nlp to patient-related texts

Abstract

Experiments in automatic analysis of free texts in Bulgarian hospital discharge letters are presented. Natural Language Processing (NLP) has been applied to medical texts since decades but high-quality results have been demonstrated only recently. The progress in automatic text analysis opens new directions for secondary use of Electronic Health Records (EHR). It enables also the design and development of software systems which provide better patient access to his/her health records as well as better maintenance of large EHR archives. We report about successful extraction of important patient-related entities from hospital EHR texts and consider several scenarios for application of NLP modules in healthcare software systems.©Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.