Visualizing unstructured patient data for assessing diagnostic and therapeutic history

Having access to relevant patient data is crucial for clinical decision making. The data is often documented in unstructured texts and collected in the electronic health record. In this paper, the authors evaluated an approach to visualize information extracted from clinical documents by means of tag cloud.

Abstract

Background

Information stored in an electronic health record

When patients are monitored over a long period of time, at each appointment it is crucial for a physician to get an overview on the progress and changes in the patient status promptly. In this work, we address the question of representing the current status of a patient that is described in form of unstructured text to enable physicians to get an overview quickly.