NLP+EHR: Automatic Detection of Adverse Drug Reactions

A group of Spanish researchers present the results of their work on applying natural language processing (NLP) techniques for electronic health record analysis and specific data extraction.
According to a new study published in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine (Santiso et al. 2021), a group of researchers at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) are collaborating with the regional health authorities to develop a system for automatic extraction of adverse drug reactions (ADR) from EHRs written in Spanish. 

ADR may cause hospital re-admissions and even death in some cases. Applying machine learning and deep learning techniques for clinical text mining, the researchers aim to pinpoint relations between drug-disease pairs. With such a system these reactions can be identified, summarised and automatically reported, assisting with clinical decision-making.

The flow comprises recognising relevant clinical entities (e.g. drugs and their ingredients, or symptoms) and then evaluating drug-disease candidate pairs as either ADR or non-ADR.