Hospitals and Health systems hold a great amount of patient information that has the potential to transform care delivery, but resides in Health IT systems as unstructured free text. Natural language processing (NLP) is a branch of Data Science that helps computers understand, interpret and manipulate human language, enabling the extraction of insights from “text”. NLP technology enables access and retrieval of critical patient data housed as unstructured information, accounting for as much as 80 percent of clinical documentation, according to industry estimates. The article from McKinsey & Company “Natural language processing in healthcare” [1] lists some approaches and applications for NLP in healthcare.
[1] “Natural language processing in healthcare”, December 2018, Suresh Rangasamy, Rosanne Nadenichek, Mahi Rayasam, and Alex Sozdatelev. McKinsey & Company. https://healthcare.mckinsey.com/natural-language-processing-healthcare