Population Health News

Identifying Disease with Natural Language Processing Technology

A Kaiser Permanente study illustrates the value of AI-based natural language processing technology in disease diagnosis.

natural language processing

Source: Kaiser Permanente

By Erin McNemar, MPA

- A recent study by Kaiser Permanente demonstrated the value of natural language processing (NLP) technology with clinicians identifying more than 50,000 patients with aortic stenosis, a common heart disease.

The study was conducted by Matthew Solomon, MD, PhD, a cardiologist at The Permanente Medical Group and a physician researcher at the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research in Oakland, California.

According to Solomon, while healthcare is currently in an era of big data and data analytics, it remains hard to identify patients with complex conditions such as valvular heart disease, making it difficult to study the disease, track practice patterns, and manage population health.