Natural Language Processing in HIT
In recent discussions with other colleagues in the health informatics or health IT space, we found that there are many researchers and papers in this space but few actual notable applications deployed in the field. One example that I heard about is the NC DETECT application developed and deployed in the state of North Carolina for early event detection and public health surveillance. There is an online article about IBM and Mayo Clinic releasing their research technology into open source but no follow up new after the initial PR in April 2009.
Following is a list of research projects or conferences into utilizing Natural Language Processing to make narrative clinical notes more “computable” and “analyzable”. Since most doctors will not convert clinical note taking from free text to coded entry any time soon, there is tremendous value in having the computers make sense of these free text not just for epidemiological studies, but also for clinic decision support.
If you know of applications of NLP in healthcare, please feel free to comment on this post so we can share the knowledge. Until then, following are the research papers and conferences that I can find on NLP in health IT:
- From Natural Language Descriptions in Clinical Guidelines to Relationships in an Ontology
- First ACM International Conference on Health Informatics (IHI) Nov 2010
- MedEx: a medication information extraction system for clinical narratives
- JAMIA’s Repurposing the Clinical Record: Can an Existing Natural Language Processing System De-identify Clinical Notes?
- Video: Natural Language Processing for Clinical Informatics and Translational Research Informatics
