NLP and MTSOs

Is natural language processing the key to the future of MTSOs?

By Lynn Jusinski

The first thing Brenda Hurley, CMT, AHDI-F, noticed was "language" in the company's title. As director of industry relations and compliance for Medware Inc., Maitland, FL, she knows all about language, working for a medical transcription service organization (MTSO). So she headed up to the booth at the Toward an Electronic Patient Record (TEPR) conference and asked Language and Computing's Vice President Kyle Silvestro just what it is the company does.

The answer got her wheels spinning. She immediately phoned Kim Buchanan, CMT, AHDI-F, director of credentialing and education with the Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) to see if the company's vice president could be added to the roster for AHDI's annual conference. The technology in question is natural language processing (NLP), and Language and Computing isn't the only company to offer it. No stranger to HIM, it's used in computer-assisted coding applications, clinical information extraction and semantic search.�The software analyzes text documents, processes the results and provides the discrete data for population of EHR/HIM or billing systems. Hurley immediately saw a connection between NLP and medical transcription, a field with plenty of free text.

For years, transcribed documents have been decried as somewhat useless in an electronic world. The document appears as a blob of text that discrete data can't be extracted from. Using NLP, those documents may just garner more value in a computerized HIM world, according to Hurley. More...