Comparative evaluation of accuracy of extraction of medication information from narrative physician notes by commercial and academic natural language processing software packages.

Full Abstract

Medication information is frequently only found in narrative physician notes. It is now possible to extract medication data from narrative documents using NLP technology. A number of commercial and academic NLP software packages can perform this function. In this paper we report the first comparative evaluation of their accuracy. Evaluation was carried out on 150 notes randomly selected from electronic medical record. NLP software results were compared to manual abstraction of medication data by two independent reviewers. Recall, precision and F-measure for identification of medication names, doses, frequencies, routes and inactive status were computed. For different data categories, recall ranged from 6.6% to 90.6%, and precision from 16.7% to 96.6%. Recall was highest for medication names and lowest for identification of inactive medications; there were no significant differences in precision between data categories. NLP software accuracy improved significantly over the last decade but further improvements are needed, particularly in analysis of complex sentences.

Learn Faster Today Improve your study skills

Author information

Author/s: Turchin, Alexander (A); Morin, Laura (L); Semere, Luwam G (LG); Kashyap, Vipul (V); Palchuk, Matvey B (MB); Shubina, Maria (M); Chang, Frank (F); Li, Qi (Q);

Affiliation: Clinical Informatics Research and Development, Partners HealthCare, Boston, MA, USA.

Journal and publication information

Publication Type: Comparative Study; Evaluation Studies; Journal Article; Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't; Retracted Publication

Journal: AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings / AMIA Symposium. AMIA Symposium (AMIA Annu Symp Proc), published in United States. (Language: eng)

Reference: 2006-; vol (issue ) : pp 789-93

Dates: Created 2007/01/22; Completed 2007/09/28; Revised 2008/03/06;

PMID: 17238449, status: MEDLINE (last retrieval date: 12/26/2008)

Sourced from the National Library of Medicine. Abstract text and other information may be subject to copyright.

Comments and Corrections

RetractionIn: AMIA Annu Symp Proc. 2006;:789-93. (PMID: 18297753)

External Links for this article (including full text providers, if available):

Click Electronic Full-text Provider Links to see options for finding the electronic full text links to this article. Note there may be a subscription or fee required for access to the full text. See our FAQ for information on finding FREE full text articles.

This article may also be located in paper journal collections available in many libraries. Use the Journal and Publication Information above to find the full article.

MeSH headings (categories)

This article was linked to the MESH Headings shown below.

Natural Language Processing
Software

These are the highest related articles currently in the database:

See 100+ related articles.