Natural Language Processing, Electronic Health Records, and Clinical Research

R.L. Richesson, J.E. Andrews (eds.), Clinical Research Informatics, Health Informatics, DOI 10.1007/978-1-84882-448-5_16, © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2012 Abstract Electronic health records (EHR) capture “real-world” disease and care processes and hence offer richer and more generalizable data for comparative effectiveness research than traditional randomized clinical trial studies. With the increasingly broadening adoption of EHR worldwide, there is a growing need to widen the use of EHR data to support clinical research. A big barrier to this goal is that much of the information in EHR is still narrative. This chapter describes the foundation of biomedical natural language processing and its common uses for extracting and transforming narrative information in EHR to support clinical research.