Challenges in Clinical Named Entity Recognition for Decision Support

In addition to structured data, electronic health records contain unstructured clinical notes and narratives. The identification and classification of mentions of relevant clinical concepts is a crucial preprocessing step in designing and developing clinical decision support systems. While this task has gained significant attention in recent years, there are still a number of issues that need further investigation. This paper explores a variety of common challenges faced by clinical named entity recognition and classification methods as well as current approaches to handling them.