Named Entity Recognition in Electronic Health Records: A Methodological Review

Objectives A substantial portion of the data contained in Electronic Health Records (EHR) is unstructured, often appearing as free text. This format restricts its potential utility in clinical decision-making. Named entity recognition (NER) methods address the challenge of extracting pertinent information from unstructured text. The aim of this study was to outline the current NER methods and trace their evolution from 2011 to 2022. Methods We conducted a methodological literature review of NER methods, with a focus on distinguishing the classification models, the types of tagging systems, and the languages employed in various corpora. Results Several methods have been documented for automatically extracting relevant information from EHRs using natural language processing techniques such as NER and relation extraction (RE). These methods can automatically extract concepts, events, attributes, and other data, as well as the relationships between them. Most NER studies conducted thus far have utilized corpora in English or Chinese. Additionally, the bidirectional encoder representation from transformers using the BIO tagging system architecture is the most frequently reported classification scheme. We discovered a limited number of papers on the implementation of NER or RE tasks in EHRs within a specific clinical domain. Conclusions EHRs play a pivotal role in gathering clinical information and could serve as the primary source for automated clinical decision support systems. However, the creation of new corpora from EHRs in specific clinical domains is essential to facilitate the swift development of NER and RE models applied to EHRs for use in clinical practice

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) applied in palliative care: topic review

Aim: To check the tools used on the e - health researches on the palliative care item on the five last years. Method: A bibliographic review was carried out in PubMed, Scopus and Bireme databases on the subject of palliative care, e-health and costs. Results: The use of the Information technologies, the majority of the surveys find favorably the use of technology in the users who receive palliative care, since it facilitates the evaluation and handling symptoms. It improves too the communication between patients and health professionals, reducing in some cases de geographic displacements and decreasing the associated cost to the attention of these patients. Conclusion: E-health implementation through different intervention models has proven to be valuable for individuals with advance disease in palliative care, offering potential educational and the optimization of time and means for patients and caregivers, which improve the contact with the health professionals