Unlocking the power of unstructured data in healthcare: How NLP is transforming patient care

In today’s digital age, electronic health records (EHRs) have become the backbone of modern healthcare systems. They represent the primary source of truth for each patient’s medical history, past and present conditions, and ongoing treatments. However, many challenges still remain with regard to EHRs, including the disruption of clinicians’ workflows, time-consuming data entry, and the negative impact they can have on the doctor-patient relationship. 1

In particular, there is a wealth of unstructured data contained within EHRs because healthcare professionals (HCPs) tend to avoid ticking boxes and answering short and uncontextualized answers, preferring to write their notes in the free text portion of medical exam forms. This is because, in healthcare, context, possibility, negation, and patient input are pivotal and it can only be ‘coded’ in what is called natural language (in opposition to ‘formal languages’ as those ‘spoken’ by databases). This makes it difficult to interpret and exploit the existing data with legacy technologies, creating a big dependency on manual reviews. Fortunately, all that is changing.
Read on healthcaretransformers.com