An application of eHealth technology towards the digitization of the health records of older patients with cochlear implants

Purpose: Despite the current legislative indications towards the digitization of patient health records, 80% of health data is unstructured and in a format that cannot be used in electronic archives or in registries of diseases. An innovative automated system is here proposed to efficiently retrieve and digitize clinical information from original unstructured ENT medical records, so that to reduce the manual workload in the retrieval and digitization process. Method: The system, based on an eHealth technology named 'cognitive computing', interprets medical reports to transform unstructured clinical data (e.g., narrative text) into a structured digital format. The system has been tailored to handle the reports of aged cochlear implants (CI) patients by digitizing the information typically requested in electronic CI registries and by the current ENT/audiology guidelines. Results were obtained from the reports generated by an outpatient ENT care service from 52 elderly CI patients. Results: The system allowed a quick and automated interpretation and retrieval of all the information required, such as the patient's medical history, risk factors, examinations outcomes, communicative performances before and after CI implantation, and CI settings. The accuracy of the system in correctly interpreting and retrieving the above information from the original unstructured medical reports was very good (recall= 0.78; precision=0.95). The system allowed to reduce the time needed to manually digitize the information from 20?30 minutes/report to only 20 s/report. Conclusions: The proposed system is a viable solution for the automated digitization of unstructured health data as recommended the ENT/audiology clinical best practices.