Journal Club | Tasks as needs: Reframing the paradigm of clinical natural language processing research for real-world decision support

Presented by: Prof Karin Verspoor FAIDH

Electronic medical records are increasingly used to store patient information in hospitals and other clinical settings. There has been a corresponding proliferation of clinical natural language processing (cNLP) systems aimed at using text data in these records to improve clinical decision-making, in comparison to manual clinician search and clinical judgment alone. However, these systems have delivered marginal practical utility and are rarely deployed into healthcare settings, leading to proposals for technical and structural improvements.

In this journal club, we discuss the arguments in the journal that reflects a violation of Friedman’s “Fundamental Theorem of Biomedical Informatics,” and that a deeper epistemological change must occur in the cNLP field, as a parallel step alongside any technical or structural improvements. We will also discuss the proposal written in the paper, that researchers shift away from designing cNLP systems independent of clinical needs, in which cNLP tasks are ends in themselves—“tasks as decisions”—and toward systems that are directly guided by the needs of clinicians in realistic decision-making contexts—“tasks as needs.”

Price: Members: FREE Non-members: $30 (registrations are non-refundable)	CPD Points Approved for 1 CPD point for the CHIA certification.
Can't attend this event live? Watch it on Digital Health TV! An AIDH member-only benefit, containing hundreds of on-demand videos. Topics include cybersecurity, precision health, nursing and midwifery informatics, artificial intelligence, clinical informatics, UX, virtual care and more! Not a member? No problem! Join AIDH now for unlimited access to on-demand digital health content.