CogStack - experiences of deploying integrated information retrieval and extraction services in a large National Health Service Foundation Trust hospital.

Background: Traditional health information systems are generally devised to support clinical data collection at the point of care. However, as the significance of the modern information economy expands in scope and permeates the healthcare domain, there is an increasing urgency for healthcare organisations to offer information systems that address the expectations of clinicians, researchers and the business intelligence community alike. Amongst other emergent requirements, the principal unmet need might be defined as the 3R principle (right data, right place, right time) to address deficiencies in organisational data flow while retaining the strict information governance policies that apply within the UK National Health Service (NHS).

SemEHR: A general-purpose semantic search system to surface semantic data from clinical notes for tailored care, trial recruitment, and clinical research.

Objective: Unlocking the data contained within both structured and unstructured components of electronic health records (EHRs) has the potential to provide a step change in data available for secondary research use, generation of actionable medical insights, hospital management, and trial recruitment. To achieve this, we implemented SemEHR, an open source semantic search and analytics tool for EHRs.

Methods: SemEHR implements a generic information extraction (IE) and retrieval infrastructure by identifying contextualized mentions of a wide range of biomedical concepts within EHRs.