Extracting Information for Generating A Diabetes Report Card from Free Text in Physicians Notes

Achieving guideline-based targets in patients with diabetes is crucial for improving clinical outcomes and preventing long-term complications. Using electronic heath records (EHRs) to identify high-risk patients for further intervention by screening large populations is limited because many EHRs store clinical information as dictated and transcribed free text notes that are not amenable to statistical analysis. This paper presents the process of extracting elements needed for generating a diabetes report card from free text notes written in English. Numerical measurements, representing lab values and physical examinations results are extracted from free text documents and then stored in a structured database. Extracting diagnosis information and medication lists are work in progress. The complete dataset for this project is comprised of 81,932 documents from 30,459 patients collected over a period of 5 years. The patient population is considered high risk for diabetes as they have existing cardiovascular complications. Experimental results validate our method, demonstrating high precision (88.8-100%).