The Digital Doctor: Is Natural Language Processing the Breakthrough We’ve Been Waiting For?

By BOB WACHTER, MD Natural language processing might seem a bit arcane andtechnical – the type of thing that software engineers talk about deep into the night, but of limited usefulness for practicing docs and their patients. Yet software that can “read” physicians’ and nurses’ notes may prove to be one of the seminal breakthroughs in digital medicine. Exhibit A, from the world of medical research: a recent studylinked the use of proton pump inhibitors to subsequent heart attacks. It did this by plowing through 16 million notes in electronic health records. While legitimate epidemiologic questions can be raised about the association (more on this later), the technique may well be a game-changer. Let’s start with a little background. One of the great tensions in health information technology centers on how to record data about patients. This used to be simple. At the time of Hippocrates, the doctor chronicled the patient’s symptoms in prose. The chart was, in essence, the physician’s journal. Medical historian Stanley Reiser describes the case of a gentleman named Apollonius of Abdera, who lived in the 5th century BCE. The physician’s note read: There were exacerbations of the fever; the bowels passed practically nothing of the food taken; the urine was thin and scanty. No sleep. . . . About the fourteenth day from his taking to bed, after a rigor, he grew hot; wildly delirious, shouting, distress, much rambling, followed by calm; the coma came on at this tim...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: THCB Source Type: blogs