TY - JOUR AU - Gundlapalli, Adi AU - Divita, Guy AU - Carter, Marjorie AU - Shen, Shuying AU - Palmer, Miland AU - Forbush, Tyler AU - South, Brett AU - Redd, Andrew AU - Sauer, Brian AU - Samore, Matthew PY - 2013/03/23 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Extracting Surveillance Data from Templated Sections of an Electronic Medical Note: Challenges and Opportunities JF - Online Journal of Public Health Informatics JA - OJPHI VL - 5 IS - 1 SE - Oral Presentations: Syndrome Development & Validation & Natural Language Processing DO - 10.5210/ojphi.v5i1.4535 UR - https://ojphi.org/ojs/index.php/ojphi/article/view/4535 SP - AB - Apart from the traditional structured data elements used for surveillance, the free text of the medical note provides a rich source of epidemiological information. Many electronic notes use boiler-plate templates from EMR pull-downs to document information on the patient in the form of checklists, check boxes, yes/no and free text responses to questions. There is a dearth of literature on the use of natural language processing in extracting data from templates in the EMR. This study was undertaken to highlight the challenges and opportunities of addressing templates while developing NLP algorithms for surveillance using the free text of electronic notes. ER -