AccScience Publishing / AIH / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/aih.2147
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REVIEW

Natural language processing in electronic health records: A review

Prachi Gurav1,2*
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1 Department of Decision Science and Information Systemsn Institute of Management, Mumbai, India
2 Department of Computer Engineering, St. John College of Engineering and Management, Palghar, Maharashtra, India
AIH 2024, 1(1), 16–31; https://doi.org/10.36922/aih.2147
Submitted: 31 October 2023 | Accepted: 8 January 2024 | Published: 10 January 2024
© 2024 by the Author(s). This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
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Abstract

The two fundamental tasks that a physician performs during every interaction with a patient are reading and updating electronic health records (EHRs). Reading the records is necessary to gain better knowledge of a patient’s health status while updating the records is essential for creating a database for future information extraction. If a patient’s history consists of only a few records, manual reading is the best approach. However, this method may lead to overlooking important aspects of the patient’s health, which could be detrimental. Therefore, automation is required to extract important information. Natural language processing (NLP) facilitates information extraction and operates on seven different levels. In our review, we aimed to understand how NLP levels assist in extracting information. We examined articles published in PubMed and, after critical evaluation, selected 65 out of 382 identified articles that met the inclusion criteria for the final review. Among these, 47 articles were included in the final review. We found a higher number of articles on the lexical (7), semantic (30), and morphological (4) levels, while fewer articles focused on the phonetic (1), syntactic (2), discourse (2), and pragmatic (1) levels. This distribution underscores the current emphasis within the literature on the specific aspects of NLP. In conclusion, our review underscores the critical role played by NLP in extracting information from EHR, shedding light on the varied levels at which this technology operates.

Keywords
Electronic health records
Natural language processing
Natural language processing levels
Funding
None.
Conflict of interest
There are no conflicts of interest.
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Artificial Intelligence in Health, Electronic ISSN: 3029-2387 Print ISSN: 3041-0894, Published by AccScience Publishing
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