UPMC to Discuss Natural Language Processing

 

In an educational session slated for Monday, March 4, speakers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center will discuss the academic medical center’s deployment of natural language processing, technology that can analyze words and phrases in an electronic patient record.

Adele Towers, M.D., medical director, health information management, will describe how an overabundance of electronic documentation led to missed billing opportunities and decreased revenue at U-Pittsburgh by nearly $18 million.

The organization addressed the problem by using NLP software that analyzes EHR documentation and can recognize verbiage that supports ICD-9 and ICD-10 coding. That in turn helped identify—before patient discharge— documentation gaps and inconsistencies in the ocean of data, leading to more accurate claims. Joining Towers will be Mark L. Morsch, vice president of technology, for OptumInsight, the center’s NLP software supplier. The event takes place at 9:45 am in room 282.

For a related story on how NLP is part of computer-assisted coding platforms, click here.