No abstract

We propose a machine learning approach for semantic recognition and normalization of clinical term descriptions. Clinical terms considered here are noisy descriptions in Spanish language written by health care professionals in our electronic health record system. These description terms contain clinical findings, family history, suspected disease, among other categories of concepts. Descriptions are usually very short texts presenting high lexical variability containing synonymy, acronyms, abbreviations and typographical errors. Mapping description terms to normalized descriptions requires medical expertise which makes it difficult to develop a rule-based knowledge engineering approach. In order to build a training dataset we use those descriptions that have been previously matched by terminologists to the hospital thesaurus database. We generate a set of feature vectors based on pairs of descriptions involving their individual and joint characteristics. We propose an unsupervised learning approach to discover term equivalence classes including synonyms, abbreviations, acronyms and frequent typographical errors. We evaluate different combinations of features to train MaxEnt and XGBoost models. Our system achieves an F 1 score of 89% on the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires (HIBA) problem list.

A Chatbot or Conversational Agent is a computer application that simulates the conversation with a human person (by text or voice), giving automated responses to people’s needs. In the healthcare domain, chatbots can be beneficial to help patients, as a complement to care by health personnel, especially in times of high demand or constrained resources such as the COVID-19 Pandemic. In this paper we share the design and implementation of a healthcare chatbot called Tana at the Hospital Italiano de Buenos Aires. Considering best practices and being aware of possible unintended consequences, we must take advantage of information and communication technologies, such as chatbots, to analyze and promote useful conversations for the health of all people.

Data entry is an obstacle for the usability of electronic health records (EHR) applications and the acceptance of physicians, who prefer to document using "free text". Natural language is huge and very rich in details but at the same time is ambiguous; it has great dependence on context and uses jargon and acronyms. Healthcare Information Systems should capture clinical data in a structured and preferably coded format. This is crucial for data exchange between health information systems, epidemiological analysis, quality and research, clinical decision support systems, administrative functions, etc. In order to address this point, numerous terminological systems for the systematic recording of clinical data have been developed. These systems interrelate concepts of a particular domain and provide reference to related terms and possible definitions and codes. The purpose of terminology services consists of representing facts that happen in the real world through database management. This process is named Semantic Interoperability. It implies that different systems understand the information they are processing through the use of codes of clinical terminologies. Standard terminologies allow controlling medical vocabulary. But how do we do this? What do we need? Terminology services are a fundamental piece for health data management in health environment.