EHRKit: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Electronic Health Record Texts
This toolkit addresses the need for efficient NLP processing in healthcare research, but it is incremental as it primarily packages existing methods.
The authors tackled the challenge of processing unstructured clinical notes in Electronic Health Records by creating EHRKit, a Python toolkit that provides interfaces for accessing MIMIC-III data and integrates third-party libraries for up to 12 NLP tasks, resulting in a practical tool for healthcare research.
The Electronic Health Record (EHR) is an essential part of the modern medical system and impacts healthcare delivery, operations, and research. Unstructured text is attracting much attention despite structured information in the EHRs and has become an exciting research field. The success of the recent neural Natural Language Processing (NLP) method has led to a new direction for processing unstructured clinical notes. In this work, we create a python library for clinical texts, EHRKit. This library contains two main parts: MIMIC-III-specific functions and tasks specific functions. The first part introduces a list of interfaces for accessing MIMIC-III NOTEEVENTS data, including basic search, information retrieval, and information extraction. The second part integrates many third-party libraries for up to 12 off-shelf NLP tasks such as named entity recognition, summarization, machine translation, etc.