Make sense of your Health Records
One of the important benefits of turning your health records documents into digital is the fact that, if done properly, they can be indexed with metadata (extracted automatically or not) and full-text searchable.
As this interesting CNN article points out, going paperless or at least “Less Paper“ has benefits beyond search and retrieval. Natural Language Processing or “Document Mining“ will allow the automatic “mining” of your documents, and make them fully semantic. This will allow not only to find the medical terms in it contains, but also how they interrelate, to provide an automatic analysis and “understanding” of facts in that document – and that will allow a vastly improved quality of service, the system having analyzed your patient record to provide a more informed diagnosis by your doctor and avoiding potential errors.
It does sound like science fiction – but it’s not that far away, in fact. IBM research is mentioned in the article, but researchers at Xerox and elsewhere are actively exploring the problem of “mining” patient records owing to technologies such as FactSpotter.
