Structuring Clinical Decision Support Rules for Drug Safety Using Natural Language Processing.

Journal: Studies in health technology and informatics
Published Date: Jan 1, 2018

Abstract

Drug safety is an important aspect in healthcare, resulting in a number of inadvertent events, which may harm the patients. IT based Clinical Decision Support (CDS), integrated in electronic-prescription or Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems, can provide a means for checking prescriptions for errors. This requires expressing prescription guidelines in a way that can be interpreted by IT systems. The paper uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), to interpret drug guidelines by the UK NICE BNF offered in free text. The employed NLP component, MetaMap, identifies the concepts in the instructions and interprets their semantic meaning. The UMLS semantic types that correspond to these concepts are then processed, in order to understand the concepts that are needed to be implemented in software engineering for a CDS engine.

Authors

  • George Despotou
    Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, University of Warwick. UK.
  • Ioannis Korkontzelos
    National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), School of Computer Science, The University of Manchester, Manchester Institute of Biotechnology, 131 Princess Street, Manchester M1 7DN, United Kingdom. Electronic address: Ioannis.Korkontzelos@manchester.ac.uk.
  • Nicholas Matragkas
    Department of Computer Science, University of Hull, UK.
  • Eda Bilici
    Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, University of Warwick, UK.
  • Theodoros N Arvanitis
    Institute of Digital Healthcare, WMG, University of Warwick. UK.

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