Paper ID: 2202.12159

An NLP Solution to Foster the Use of Information in Electronic Health Records for Efficiency in Decision-Making in Hospital Care

Adelino Leite-Moreira, Afonso Mendes, Afonso Pedrosa, Amândio Rocha-Sousa, Ana Azevedo, André Amaral-Gomes, Cláudia Pinto, Helena Figueira, Nuno Rocha Pereira, Pedro Mendes, Tiago Pimenta

The project aimed to define the rules and develop a technological solution to automatically identify a set of attributes within free-text clinical records written in Portuguese. The first application developed and implemented on this basis was a structured summary of a patient's clinical history, including previous diagnoses and procedures, usual medication, and relevant characteristics or conditions for clinical decisions, such as allergies, being under anticoagulant therapy, etc. The project's goal was achieved by a multidisciplinary team that included clinicians, epidemiologists, computational linguists, machine learning researchers and software engineers, bringing together the expertise and perspectives of a public hospital, the university and the private sector. Relevant benefits to users and patients are related with facilitated access to the patient's history, which translates into exhaustiveness in apprehending the patient's clinical past and efficiency due to time saving.

Submitted: Feb 24, 2022