Clinical Text Mining

Patient records are written by the physician during the treatment of the patient for mnemonic reasons and internal use within the clinical unit, but the patient record is also written for legal reasons.
Today a very large number of patient records are produced in the healthcare system. The patient records are mostly in electronic form and are written by health personnel. They describe initial symptoms, diagnosis, treatment and outcomes of the treatment, but they may also contain nursing narratives or daily notes.
In addition, patient records contain valuable structured information such as laboratory results, blood tests and drugs. These records are seldom reused, most likely because of ignorance, but also due to a lack of tools to process them adequately, and last but not least, there are ethical policies that make the records difficult to use for research and for developing tools for physicians and researchers.
There is a plethora of reasons to unlock and reuse the content of electronic patient records, since they contain valuable information about a vast number of patients who have been treated by highly skilled physicians and taken care of by welltrained and experienced nurses. Over time a massive amount of patient record data is accumulated where old knowledge can be confirmed and new knowledge can be obtained.
[Cham: 2018]

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