SearchEHR: A Family History Search System for Clinical Decision Support

Abstract

Finding patients with specific clinical conditions, such as having a familial disease history of diabetes, is an important task for clinical decision support. Clinical notes in Electronic Health Records (EHR), which document the patient medical history and familial disease history, are valuable resources for patient cohort selection. However, such information is difficult to discover in clinical text, and full-text search techniques often fail due to the unique characteristics of clinical language. We describe a system - -SearchEHR - -that combines Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Information Retrieval (IR) techniques to facilitate utilising clinical notes to find cohorts of patients, with a special focus on family disease history.