Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps healthcare organizations mine transcribed data to enhance patient care, improve profitability, and comply with HIPAA

Do you know how many cases of pneumonia your providers treated last year? Do you know how they treated the condition and which treatments were the most effective? Natural Language Processing (NLP) allows you to access data so that you can enhance patient care while simultaneously improving your organization’s bottom line.

The problem with unstructured data

The healthcare industry is known for its vast amount of medical information that has been transcribed and stored as free-text. The problem with free-text, or unstructured data, is that large and significant portions of the information cannot be highlighted or sorted and therefore, valuable information remains locked inside the EHR database. To solve this problem, software companies have developed Natural Language Processing (NLP) software specifically designed for the healthcare industry.

NLP technology has become a powerful tool to unlocking vital clinical data and turning it into information that can be analyzed and acted upon while remaining HIPAA compliant. Proper natural language processing allows vast amounts of detailed information to be mined from patient notes and analyzed without a single human having access to private information.

Create structured data that can be used for many purposes

Natural language processing of transcribed medical records creates structured databases that can be used for search, coding, indexing, XML exporting, and integration by multiple end users. By using a natural language processing system, healthcare professionals can now extract Clinical Quality Measures and Core Measures to monitor and improve the way your providers treat their patients. Most significantly, natural language processing will increase patient safety by generating information based on a sophisticated text analysis, thus decreasing the margin for human error. In addition to enhancing patient care, NLP improves a healthcare organization’s bottom line by properly identifying diagnoses and billable codes in the clinical narrative.

Mine big data to drive medical research and scientific breakthroughs

Finally, NLP allows scientists to look at “big data” in order to identify common factors between symptoms, diseases, geographic locations, and patient genes or characteristics so that they can better understand the causes of common and not-so-common medical conditions and diseases.

Taken together, natural language processing of medical information helps the healthcare industry on both a micro and a macro level by creating searchable information that can be utilized to enhance patient care, increase profitability, and drive medical advances so that healthcare providers can better treat the patients they serve.

For more information on NLP for the healthcare industry and HIPAA compliant medical transcription services, give us a call.