Technologies for extracting full value from the electronic patient record

Unstructured medical texts, such as the reports and narrative portions of electronic patient record, pose numerous problems in data communication, data base navigation, information retrieval, and records management. The computational complexity introduced by these problems stand in the way of physicians who wish to use these electronic modalities to effectively deliver care to their patients and access the knowledge sources that will keep their professional skills current. Three potentially complementary technologies have begun to demonstrate their promise for dealing with these problems. Markup Languages, Concept Spaces, and JAVA. Each requires investing a certain amount of preprocessing or pre-programming up front. We discuss these three technologies separately but with the partially tested understanding that each can support and leverage the other.