Natural Language Processing of Nursing Notes: An Integrative Review.

Area of Science:

• Nursing Informatics
• Health Informatics
• Computational Linguistics

Background:

• Medical Natural Language Processing (NLP) is advancing, but its application in nursing is under-explored.
• A systematic review identified 43 studies on NLP in nursing notes, primarily from 2015-2021, with most using inpatient data.

Approach:

• Searched PubMed, EMBASE, and CINAHL for studies on NLP in nursing notes.
• Extracted data on study purpose, patient population, methodology, performance metrics, and quality indicators.
• Analyzed the use of standard terminologies and reporting of performance evaluation.

Key Points:

• Most studies (86%) were published between 2015-2021, with 58% utilizing inpatient data.
• Commonly used terminologies included Unified Medical Language System and Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine; nursing-specific terminologies were rare.
• Performance metrics like F-score were reported in only 61% of applicable studies.

Conclusions:

• The volume of nursing NLP research is small compared to broader medical literature.
• Future research should prioritize using standard nursing terminologies and reporting comprehensive performance metrics for scalability and comparability.