Doctors' Notes Turn Into EMR Insights With Natural Language Processing Software

IBM recently announced that its content analysis software now allows doctors using Epic’s electronic medical record (EMR) software to accurately incorporate their notes into patient records to extract insights in real-time.

The integration of IBM’s natural language processing software with Epic’s EMR represents a major advance that enables physician practices to use narrative notes as part of patient documentation.  Millions of physicians around the globe are adopting electronic medical records into their practices, but traditional doctors’ notes still play an important role in tracking and managing patient visits. IBM’s technology aims to help doctors more accurately document patient issues such as diagnoses, medications and allergies into EMR systems. By creating this opportunity to easily capture data elements for each patient, IBM’s solutions can enable more holistic and individualized care, coordinated between various providers.

IBM’s software can analyze doctors’ notes and transform them into a format that can be readily uploaded into the patient record, including automatically adding industry standard diagnosis and treatment codes.

“Electronic medical records are at the center of most care processes today, and adding a natural language option to the documentation tools can improve the quality and efficiency of health care today,” said Michael Weiner, DO, director, healthcare strategic services, IBM. “Doctors’ notes often contain some of the most important information about a patient’s condition and treatment plan, and natural language processing technology will automate much of the work to incorporate that information into medical records.”

This natural language processing software, called IBM Content Analytics is part of the IBM Advanced Care Insight Solution and is also used in the IBM Watson cognitive system, allowing it to understand complex questions posed in natural language and uncover answers from vast amounts of data.

Used in conjunction with EMRs, IBM’s natural language processing software will:

• Capture important information from doctors’ notes in EMRs to ensure complete and accurate patient information
• Simplify payment processes as the software automatically codes relevant data to medical standards like ICD9
• Utilize clinical document architecture (CDA) as the data exchange format between EMR systems and IBM Content Analytics

For more information, visit ibm.com/smartercare.

For more information IBM Content Analytics, visit http://www-03.ibm.com/software/products/us/en/subcategory/SWN40.