Article Highlights:
- Medical care is estimated to account for only 10-20% of healthcare outcomes. As a result, healthcare executives who wish to deliver high-quality care have to consider other elements that impact patient health, including income, access to healthcare, racial discrimination, adequate medication and dietary intake. These are social determinants of health. They offer a wealth of information about non-clinical factors that have an impact on a patient's wellbeing. But identifying a patient's SDOH can be challenging because details aren't always easily accessible, especially at the time when clinicians make key treatment decisions.
- NLP is a type of artificial intelligence that is concerned with the interactions between computers and human language. Using NLP, a computer can interpret the contents of documents, then extract information and insights. NLP-based text mining transforms the free (unstructured) text in documents and databases into normalized, structured data suitable for analysis or to drive machine learning algorithms. NLP text mining can rapidly identify facts, relationships and assertions that would otherwise remain buried in the mass of textual big data. Once extracted, this information is converted into a structured form that can be further analyzed, or presented directly using clustered HTML tables, mind maps, charts, etc.
Comments