Analyzing differences between chinese and english clinical text: a cross-institution comparison of discharge summaries in two languages.
Worldwide adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) databases in health care have generated an unprecedented amount of clinical data available electronically. There has been an increasing trend in US and western institutions towards collaborating with China on medical research using EMR data. However, few studies have investigated characteristics of EMR data in China and their differences with the data in US hospitals. As an initial step towards differentiating EMR data in Chinese and US systems, this study attempts to understand system and cultural differences that may exist between Chinese and English clinical documents. We collected inpatient discharge summaries from one Chinese and from three US institutions and manually analyzed three major clinical components in text: medical problems, tests, and treatments. We reported comparison results at the document level and section level and discussed potential reasons for observed differences. Documenting and understanding differences in clinical reports from the US and China EMRs are important for cross-country collaborations. Our study also provided valuable insights for developing natural language processing tools for Chinese clinical text.
School of Biomedical Informatics, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, Houston, TN, USA.
Yonghui
Y
Wu
Jianbo
J
Lei
Wei-Qi
WQ
Wei
Buzhou
B
Tang
Joshua C
JC
Denny
S Trent
ST
Rosenbloom
Randolph A
RA
Miller
Dario A
DA
Giuse
Kai
K
Zheng
Hua
H
Xu
D002681:China; D004282:Documentation; D057286:Electronic Health Records / Q000145:classification*; D008498:Medical Record Linkage / Q000379:methods*; D009323:Natural Language Processing; D063886:Patient Discharge Summaries / Q000145:classification*; D012660:Semantics; D014175:Translating; D014481:United States; D018875:Vocabulary, Controlled