Big Data Advanced Topics

In this chapter, the authors focus their attention on explicit knowledge management, as that, to date, has been the primary focus of both traditional Analytics 1.0 and big data Analytics 2.0 use cases. Individual components of knowledge management are common in healthcare, such as knowledge bases built into electronic health record (EHR) systems for drug-drug interaction checking or the maintenance of evidence-based order sets to reduce variability of patient outcomes. While EHR technology has brought computers into the exam room, the field continues to gather a majority of data about the patient through unstructured and semi-structured text. Within the healthcare space, Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology is being used to extract structured data from unstructured medical records and has become one of the signature use cases in Analytics 2.0. In the early days of NLP, much of the work focused on hand-coding rules and decision trees.