Automatic Classification of Electronic Nursing Narrative Records Based on Japanese Standard Terminology for Nursing

In Japan, nursing records are not easily put to secondary use because nursing documentation is not standardized. In recent years, electronic health records have necessitated the creation of Japanese nursing terminology. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate an automatic classification system for narrative nursing records using natural language processing technology and machine learning. We collected a week's worth of narrative nursing records from an academic hospital. The authors independently annotated the text data, dividing it into morphemes, the smallest meaningful unit in a language. During preprocessing when creating feature quantities, we used a Japanese tokenizer, MeCab, an open-source morphological parser, and the bag-of-words model. A support vector machine was adopted as a classifier for machine learning. The accuracy was 0.96 and 0.86 on the training set and test set, respectively, and the F value was 0.82. Our findings provide useful information regarding the development of an automatic classification system for Japanese nursing records using nursing terminology and natural language processing techniques.