Automatic Extraction of Medication Data from Semi-Structured Prescriptions.

Journal: Studies in health technology and informatics
PMID:

Abstract

In many healthcare facilities, the prescription of drugs is done only in a semi-structured manner, using free-text fields where various information is often mixed. Therefore, automatic processing, especially for secondary use such as research purposes, is often challenging. This paper compares various approaches that identify and classify the various parts of these free-text fields in German language, namely simple Levenshtein-based, rule-based and CRF (conditional random field)-based approaches. Our results show that a F1-score >90% can be achieved with both the rule-based and the CRF-based approach, with the CRF-based approach even reaching nearly 95%.

Authors

  • Johannes Benedict Oehm
    Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Münster, Münster, Germany.
  • Oliver Wenning
    Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Münster, Münster, Germany.
  • Michael Storck
    Institute of Medical Informatics, University of Münster, Münster, Germany.
  • Xiaoyi Jiang
    Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Münster, Münster, Germany.
  • Julian Varghese
    Institute of Medical Data Science, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany.