Free Text Analysis in Electronic Clinical Documentation

This study finds reason in the now wide availability of clinical documentation stored in electronic form to track the patient’s health status during his care path. The diffusion of these practices make available many biomedical collections of electronic data, easily accessible at low cost that can be used for research purposes in the field of observational epidemiological studies, in analogy with what was historically already done in studies based on the reviewing of medical records. However, since these collections are not organized according to specific survey schemes, they sometimes do not allow the index events to be discriminated with the necessary reliability between one source and another automatically. This poses the problem of finding effective methods of critical rereading of texts able of solving this deficiency and, according to the possibility, of bringing the words or segments back into subdomains that can be analyzed statistically. It is proposed to address the problem, showing study criteria and an empirical experience, consistent with the needs of a biomedical context.