Linguistic Analytics Translate Doctor Scribbles

May 31, 2017

Healthcare is one of the industries that people imagine can be revolutionized by new technology. Digital electronic medical records, faster, more accurate diagnostic tools, and doctors having the ability to digest piles of data in minutes are some of the newest and best advances in medicine. Despite all of these wonderful improvements, healthcare still lags behind other fields transforming their big data into actionable, usable data. Inside Big Data shares the article, “How NLP Can Help Healthcare ‘Catchup’” discusses how natural language processing can help the healthcare industry make more effective use of their resources.

The reason healthcare lags behind other fields is that most of their data is unstructured:

This large realm of unstructured data includes qualitative information that contributes indispensable context in many different reports in the EHR, such as outside lab results, radiology images, pathology reports, patient feedback and other clinical reports. When combined with claims data this mix of data provides the raw material for healthcare payers and health systems to perform analytics. Outside the clinical setting, patient-reported outcomes can be hugely valuable, especially for life science companies seeking to understand the long-term efficacy and safety of therapeutic products across a wide population.

Natural language processing relies on linguistic algorithms to identify key meanings in unstructured data. When meaning is given to unstructured data, then it can be inserted into machine learning algorithms. Bitext’s computational linguistics platform does the same with its sentimental analysis algorithm. Healthcare information is never black and white like data in other industries. While the unstructured data is different from patient to patient, there are similarities and NLP helps the machine learning tools learn how to quantify what was once-unquantifiable.

Whitney Grace, May 31, 2017

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under algorithms, Bitext, healthcare, News, Unstructured Data

Comments

One Response to “Linguistic Analytics Translate Doctor Scribbles”

RaymondLosse on June 16th, 2017 7:03 pm

Real Data Analysis with Nvivo Data Analysis Software by QSR International http://www.nvivo.com – NVivo Software!..

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.