Empowered Patient Podcast Medical Natural Language Processing Unlocks Value of Patient Data with Tim O’Connell MD Emtelligent
Dr. Tim O'Connell is a practicing radiologist and CEO and Co-Founder of Emtelligent, a medical natural language processing company. Their software converts unstructured text in medical documents into structured data to allow a variety of clients to get access to information that in the past has not been available.
Tim explains, "The problem was that the NLP engine just wasn't good enough. If there was a family history item, it would misidentify it as belonging to the patient. Sometimes it would get negation wrong, and it would miss important terms or have a hard time dealing with ambiguous words or acronyms. I knew that the premise was correct. As a clinician, I needed better access to patient data, and I needed access to the unstructured data, but I needed a better NLP engine in order to get it."
"What we've done is really brought together medical experts and NLP experts and built a system that understands the very unique medical language. Just to take one example, you take something as simple as the word PT. It could mean patient. It could mean physiotherapy. It could mean physiotherapist. It could mean prothrombin time. It could mean posterior tibial, referring to a tendon or a blood vessel. So, dealing with these very special and unique problems, you need to do it on a medical basis."
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