Acronym Soup: NLP and CLU in EHRs
This article from KevinMD.com has taught me a new acronym: CLU, or Clinical Language Understanding. CLU is a way to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) in the medical world. In other words, it's like a "medical encyclopedia" inside an NLP system:
"CLU works off of a complete, highly granular medical ontology, which has been tuned to relate and identify all kinds of medical facts so that the underlying NLP engine can “understand” what the caregiver is saying. For example, CLU knows that “cancer” is a “disease” and would auto-populate the EHR with that information. CLU knows that “amoxicillin” is an “antibiotic;” this knowledge is a direct impact of the ontology. .. Clinical Language Understanding allows doctors to be efficient with documentation, helps to ensure patients’ medical records are comprehensive and are not reduced purely structured content created by point-and-click templates..."
I'm in the process of creating a special interest group related to NLP here at Resilient Ambassadors HQ, and I think this might be the focus of one of our first conversations.
