NORMALIZATION OF HEALTH RECORDS IN THE SERBIAN LANGUAGE WITH THE AIM OF SMART HEALTH SERVICES REALIZATION

The development of information technology increases its use in various spheres of human activity, including healthcare. Bundles of data and reports are generated and stored in textual form, such as symptoms, medical history, and doctor’s observations of patients' health. Electronic recording of patient data not only facilitates day-to-day work in hospitals, enables more efficient data management and reduces material costs, but can also be used for further processing and to gain knowledge to improve public health. Publicly available health data would contribute to the development of telemedicine, e-health, epidemic control, and smart healthcare within smart cities. This paper describes the importance of textual data normalization for smart healthcare services. An algorithm for normalizing medical data in Serbian is proposed in order to prepare them for further processing (F1-score=0,816), in this case within the smart health framework. By applying this algorithm, in addition to the normalized medical records, corpora of keywords and stop words, which are specific to the medical domain, are also obtained and can be used to improve the results in the normalization of medical textual data.