Citywide quality of health information system through text mining of electronic health records

A system of hospitals in large cities can be considered a large and diverse but interconnected system. Widely applied in hospitals, electronic health records (EHR) are crucially different from each other because of the use of different health information systems, internal hospital rules, and individual behavior of physicians. The unstructured (textual) data of EHR is rarely used to assess the citywide quality of healthcare. Within the study, we analyze EHR data, particularly textual unstructured data, as a reflection of the complex multi-agent system of healthcare in the city of Saint Petersburg, Russia. Through analyzing the data collected by the Medical Information and Analytical Center, a method was proposed and evaluated for identifying a common structure, understanding the diversity, and assessing information quality in EHR data through the application of natural language processing techniques.