Despite decades of technological advances within the field of health care, including the use of Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems, it has been estimated that approximately 80% of medical data remains unstructured and unused after it is created. This not only makes it difficult to obtain a complete picture of the care delivery process, but also has the potential to frustrate health care providers who have to wade through multiple text documents to get a full view of patient health. Natural Language Processing (NLP) can help alleviate these problems and enhance the entire patient care workflow.  

The objective of this capstone was to 1) introduce the reader to the topic of NLP; 2) review current literature related to NLP, specifically within the field of health care; 3) investigate current NLP practices within an integrated health care system; and 4) provide a list of new opportunities for NLP use within the integrated health care system to enable better patient care, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency.