Radiology decision-support firm Medicalis introduced a new natural language processing (NLP) feature option for its Decision Support Platform as a work-in-progress at RSNA 2014.
NLP eliminates the need for physicians to "hunt and find" structured reasons for the study when attempting to structure an order for the delivery of clinical decision support, the firm said. Instead, the physician provides a narrative, free-text reason for study, and the NLP will both decode and structure this data for use within decision support.
The clinicians use structure indications as a backup, and the physicians can use the language and terminology they are most comfortable with instead of trying to find the most representative term from a set of structure indications, Medicalis added.
Other advantages include preparing for the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) mandate requiring decision support for high-tech procedures in 2017, and as a solution for the integrated delivery network market to assist in managing the complexities of these environments.
