Natural Language Processing (NLP) may be one healthcare information technology that actually performs.  In recent years, many EHR and EMR vendors have designed systems requiring clinicians to enter structured terms or codes upon data entry.  This has met with resistance, and much medical documentation remains as free text, as natural language better describes the evaluation and treatment of the patient.  Free text has display value at the point of care and can be interpreted by other clinicians, but it is not easily computable and interpreted by other computers.  Computers understand codes. Free text cannot be used to drive rules engines and clinical decision support, unless it is first turned back into discreet codes.   Natural Language Processing turns text into facts and codes, using sophisticated parsing of language based on both statistical and ontological approaches.  

Over the past year, U.S. Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center (TATRC), Fort Detrick, MD evaluated the suitability of several natural language processing engines to turn free text into codes.   Based on a down-select process, TATRC  is currently working with Progeny Systems, Inc. and Language and Computing, Inc., under a Phase II Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Project to further evaluate natural language processing for use in clinical encounter documentation in AHLTA, DOD’s Electronic Health Record, and for use in enhanced biosurveillance. 

Language and Computing, Inc. specializes in advanced information management solutions for the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets by providing the latest Natural Language Processing (NLP) technologies. Products:

- TeSSI(R) Semantic Processing Platform: an innovative, integrated content processing platform allowing enterprise-wide understanding of the information contained in text data.

- LinKFactory(R) Ontology Management Platform: the complete, scalable and customizable environment for building and maintaining rich, extensive domain and corporate ontologies and providing terminology services.

- LinKBase(R) Medical Ontology: the largest formal medical knowledge base in the world, representing medicine in such a way that it is understandable for a computer.

-The LinKBase(R) Medical Ontology is specifically developed to support automated processing of unstructured clinical text.

Website: http://www.landcglobal.com