Automated application of clinical practice guidelines for asthma management

Clinical practice guidelines will be more beneficial when they are integrated with the electronic medical record. We applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to extract clinical findings from outpatient progress notes in an attempt to: 1) select outpatient chart notes appropriate for evaluation against the National Heart, Lung, and Blood/National Asthma Education Program clinical practice guidelines for the diagnosis and management of asthma, 2) determine patient need for inhaled anti-inflammatory agents, and 3) quantify the severity of asthma. Our results were compared to judgements by an expert panel of practitioners. We were able to correctly identify the need for inhaled anti-inflammatory agents 76% of the time. The success of this pilot project could have broad implications for the application of clinical practice guidelines.