Natural Language Processing
Put the power of natural language processing (NLP) to work with Clarity Clinical Documentation (Clarity CD) from Consensus. Transform insights from your unstructured documents into actionable intelligence to drive informed decision-making.
To discover the transformative potential of Clarity CD, contact us to discuss how our solution can meet your needs.
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Overview
Clarity CD’s intelligent data extraction technology uses NLP to transform unstructured documents into actionable intelligence. By harnessing NLP and machine learning (ML), Clarity CD unlocks insights from digital scans, faxes, handwritten notes and other unstructured document types and sends details to the right place, improving record-keeping and elevating patient care for today’s healthcare organizations.
The Power of Natural Language Processing
A type of ML technology, NLP allows computers to process and interpret human language. NLP combines the disciplines of computer science and linguistics to analyze language and create intelligent systems that can understand and derive meaning from text and speech.
While computers have long been faster at analyzing large volumes of data, they were less adept at tasks that required cognitive or creative skills, like writing content or generating code. However, in recent years, we’ve witnessed significant leaps forward in these domains, thanks in large part to NLP.
NLP works by transforming language into data through several processes, such as:
- Tokenization breaks larger blocks of text into smaller ones, called tokens. These tokens are semantic units and may be single characters or short clauses.
- Stop word removal is removing words that don’t add value, such as articles or prepositions.
- Lemmatization/Stemming reduces words to their root forms or word stems and groups them with similar words
- Dependency processing assesses how words in a sentence relate to one another.
- Part of speech tagging is tagging words to align with their grammatical case.
Benefits
We’ve all benefited from some NLP capabilities for years. For example, text prediction—the capability to project the next word in a sentence based on the preceding set of words—is a type of rudimentary NLP in action. Today, NLP can handle a wide range of more sophisticated tasks like assessing the sentiment of text, classifying and analyzing reports and summarizing questions.
In a healthcare setting, NLP can extract and route data from unstructured documents, such as medical faxes and link information to the correct patient records. Additionally, healthcare organizations can benefit from employing NLP to simplify back-office and administrative tasks, reducing manual effort and allowing teams to focus on delivering higher-value care.
Eliminating manual data entry and promoting more accurate record keeping are two of the most significant advantages of NLP for healthcare organizations. Every medical organization handles high volumes of documents every day, including low-resolution faxes and handwritten notes from care providers.
With an NLP-powered solution, such as Clarity CD, you can extract accurate details from these and other documents and link these insights directly to patient records to streamline processes and deliver higher-quality patient care.
Increase accuracy and efficiency
By allowing automatic ingestion of medical faxes into electronic health record (EHR) systems without error-prone manual intervention.
Make critical information available quickly
By automating the input of essential patient data from various unstructured patient documents into EHRs.
Reduce physician burnout
By reducing the amount of labor-intensive manual effort required to maintain accurate patient records and allowing physicians to focus on clinical excellence.
Expedite referrals
By ensuring patient records contain the most complete, up-to-date information on health history, diagnoses, treatment plans and other vital data..
Enhance patient satisfaction
By reducing the amount of labor-intensive manual effort required to maintain accurate patient records and allowing physicians to focus on clinical excellence.
NLP Solutions
Many patients need services from multiple care providers in various organizations. That’s why faxing remains a critical way for healthcare organizations to connect and communicate. .
However, relying on traditional paper-based faxing has significant drawbacks. Not only is it labor-intensive and expensive, but traditional faxing also introduces security issues that could put sensitive patient personal and health data at risk. Any compromise of protected patient health information could lead to regulatory scrutiny and costly fines. Additionally, traditional faxing methods require stationary fax machines that can limit clinician access to patient information.
Today, many healthcare organizations are transitioning to digital record-keeping and communications—and traditional, paper-based faxing can’t keep up. Instead, outdated, paper-intensive approaches introduce unnecessary bottlenecks as team members struggle to manage physical documents. What’s more, when inputting data from paper documents into digital systems, errors are all too common. These mistakes can cause missteps in patient care that can result in costly delays.
The Clarity solution integrates with eFax Corporate to provide online cloud faxing capabilities that simplify your workflows.
With Clarity CD and eFax Corporate, you can send and receive faxes via email with ease using computers, laptops, tablets or smartphones. It’s no longer necessary to have fax machine hardware, which means lower IT maintenance costs for your organization.
Clarity CD gives you:
- Effortless extraction of patient demographic and health data from unstructured digital documents.
- Patient data, such as demographic details or patient IDs, are linked automatically to the correct digital form fields.
- Highlighted data that requires prompt attention for clinician alerting.
- Insights on data accuracy with a confidence score for each extracted field.
- Continuous and automatic learning that becomes more efficient and intelligent over time.
- Seamless integration with EHRs to support the ingestion of inbound digital fax data and links to the right patient records.
NLP Healthcare Use Cases
Clarity CD supports healthcare organizations of every scale, from small practices to large, multi-site healthcare systems, along with adjacent industries.
Primary Care and Specialist Practices
Many primary care and specialist practices must deliver high-quality patient care while maximizing efficiency and minimizing costs. With Clarity CD’s NLP technology, these practices can increase the accuracy of clinical documentation and reduce manual work, saving time, effort and money.
Rehabilitation Therapy Providers
Often, physical therapists, occupational therapists and other rehabilitation practitioners must coordinate with other care providers to develop individualized treatment plans for each patient. With its advanced NLP capabilities, Clarity CD simplifies inter-practice communication by linking faxes, handwritten notes and other unstructured documents directly to patient records for the most up-to-date, accurate patient insights and informed care planning.
Mental Health Facilities
Mental health providers collect highly sensitive patient information that must stay protected at all times. In addition, psychiatrists, counselors, social workers and others may need to receive communications from other care providers or outside organizations, such as schools, workplaces or courts. Clarity CD’s NLP functionality lets these practices safeguard confidential information by routing data from unstructured documents directly to patient records to prevent unauthorized access to sensitive data.
Urgent Care Centers and Emergency Rooms
Patients at urgent care or emergency medical facilities may need immediate medical attention—and up-to-date, accurate patient records are critical to expedite care. This is especially true when transferring patients from one facility to another to address a severe health issue. Using the power of NLP, Clarity CD promotes accurate data transfer from one provider to an urgent care or emergency facility, helping patients get the care they need as quickly as possible.
Pharmacies
Pharmacies receive unstructured documents—like scans and handwritten faxes—from dozens to hundreds of medical offices per day. It’s vital to connect patient prescriptions and records to ensure individuals receive the proper medications in the right dosages. With Clarity CD’s NLP functionality, pharmacies can ingest information directly from healthcare office forms and fax submissions and link those details to patient records to fill prescriptions quickly and accurately.
Home Healthcare Agencies
Home healthcare providers typically travel to multiple patient sites per day. Because of the mobile nature of their work, these practitioners may use paper records to chart patient diagnoses, conditions, treatment plans, medications and more. Transferring this unstructured information into patient records is essential to ensure the best quality care, but handling this manually is time-consuming and prone to error. With Clarity CD’s NLP solution, providers can trust that unstructured data links directly to the correct patient record and remove a significant administrative burden from their busy work days.
Clinical and Academic Research
Pharmacies receive unstructured documents—like scans and handwritten faxes—from dozens to hundreds of medical offices per day. It’s vital to connect patient prescriptions and records to ensure individuals receive the proper medications in the right dosages. With Clarity CD’s NLP functionality, pharmacies can ingest information directly from healthcare office forms and fax submissions and link those details to patient records to fill prescriptions quickly and accurately.
