title: Study of effect of drug lexicons on medication extraction from electronic medical records.
abstract: Extraction of relevant information from free-text clinical notes is becoming increasingly important in healthcare to provide personalized care to patients. The purpose of this dictionary-based NLP study was to determine the effects of using varying drug lexicons to automatically extract medication information from electronic medical records. A convenience training sample of 52 documents, each containing at least one medication, and a randomized test sample of 100 documents were used in this study. The training and test set documents contained a total of 681 and 641 medications respectively. Three sets of drug lexicons were used as sources for medication extraction: first, containing drug name and generic name; second with drug, generic and short names; third with drug, generic and short names followed by filtering techniques. Extraction with the first drug lexicon resulted in 83.7% sensitivity and 96.2% specificity for the training set and 85.2% sensitivity and 96.9% specificity for the test set. Adding the list of short names used for drugs resulted in increasing sensitivity to 95.0%, but decreased the specificity to 79.2% for the training set. Similar results of increased sensitivity of 96.4% and 80.1% specificity were obtained for the test set. Combination of a set of filtering techniques with data from the second lexicon increased the specificity to 98.5% and 98.8% for the training and test sets respectively while slightly decreasing the sensitivity to 94.1% (training) and 95.8% (test). Overall, the lexicon with filtering resulted in the highest precision, i.e., extracted the highest number of medications while keeping the number of extracted non-medications low.
authors.affiliation: Marshfield Clinic Research Foundation, Marshfield, WI 54449, USA. sirohi.ekta@marshfieldclinic.org
authors.forename: E
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Sirohi
authors.forename: P
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Peissig
mesh_terms: D001330:Electronic Data Processing / Q000379:methods*; D006801:Humans; D008499:Medical Records; D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations / Q000145:classification*; D011381:Programming Languages; D012106:Research / Q000639:trends; D017432:Unified Medical Language System
chemical_list: D004364:Pharmaceutical Preparations