A large amount of information in Electronic Health Records (EHRs) is available in the form of free-text narratives, such as discharge summaries, physician notes, nurse notes etc. Medical professionals spend significant time understanding these notes, which can lead to delayed diagnosis. It is also common for the interaction between doctors and patients to be incompletely documented, which can sometimes negatively impact treatment. Thus, there is a need for automated tools to process and understand free-texts. This patent describes a method to assist medical personnel by using unstructured free texts as inputs to a computer program and giving the possible diagnosis and the treatment methods as the output. This may help medical personnel reduce the time required to diagnose a patient and thus help save lives.
Title: Medical diagnostic aid and method
Patent ID: 20200118682
Patent Holder: Fujitsu Ltd
Link – https://patents.google.com/patent/US20200118682A1
(image: Fujitsu – doctor by loonyhiker / CC BY NC-ND 2.0)