EHR Natural Language Processing Isn't Perfect, but It's Really Useful

Advocate Health Care informaticist says there are both challenges and opportunities for as technology becomes more widely used in clinical settings.

The rise of electronic health records with natural language processing technology is transforming provider workflow and clinical documentation. Though NLP is not without its challenges, it can offer valuable benefits when used wisely, said Anupam Goel, vice president of clinical information at Chicago-based Advocate Health Care.

While NLP can offer advanced diagnostic benefits, it depends heavily on the specifics of how clinicians enter their documentation, Goel said this week at the Healthcare IT News and HIMSS Big Data and Healthcare Analytics Forum in San Francisco. The moment is ripe for NLP-enabled charting, he said. The technology has sufficiently evolved to be useful rather than counterproductive, and the benefits – ease-of-use, a shorter window between clinical documentation and the activation of care teams – are clear.

Goel said he expects more clinicians will be using voice commands to log data rather than filling out forms. NLP is useful for identifying clinical gaps, he said, and can help organizations reduce labor costs. That said, "there are lots of ways NLP can screw up," he said...