Systematic Analysis of Cross-Institutional Medication Description Patterns in Clinical Notes

Abstract

In clinical notes, medication information follows certain semantic patterns and some medication descriptions contain additional word(s) between medication attributes. Therefore, it is essential to understand the semantic patterns as well as the patterns of the context interspersed among them for natural language processing tools to effectively extract comprehensive medication information. We examined both semantic and context patterns and compared those found in Mayo Clinic and i2b2 challenge data. We found that some variations exist between the institutions but the dominant patterns are common.