Detection of practice pattern trends through Natural Language Processing of clinical narratives and biomedical literature

AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2007 Oct 11:2007:120-4.

Abstract

Clinical knowledge, best evidence, and practice patterns evolve over time. The ability to track these changes and study practice trends may be valuable for performance measurement and quality improvement efforts. The goal of this study was to assess the feasibility and validity of methods to generate and compare trends in biomedical literature and clinical narrative. We focused on the challenge of detecting trends in medication usage over time for two diseases: HIV/AIDS and asthma. Information about disease-specific medications in published randomized control trials and discharge summaries at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital over a ten-year period were extracted using Natural Language Processing. This paper reports on the ability of our semi-automated process to discover disease-drug practice pattern trends and interpretation of findings across the biomedical and clinical text sources.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Validation Study

MeSH terms

  • Anti-Asthmatic Agents / therapeutic use
  • Anti-HIV Agents / therapeutic use
  • Asthma / drug therapy*
  • Electronic Data Processing
  • Feasibility Studies
  • HIV Infections / drug therapy*
  • Humans
  • Information Storage and Retrieval / methods*
  • MEDLINE
  • Medical Records
  • Natural Language Processing*
  • Patient Discharge
  • Practice Patterns, Physicians' / trends*
  • Randomized Controlled Trials as Topic
  • Retrospective Studies

Substances

  • Anti-Asthmatic Agents
  • Anti-HIV Agents