Facilitating clinical research through automation: Combining optical character recognition with natural language processing.

By applying this optical character recognition/natural language processing pipeline, we achieved significant operational improvement and reduced time for information retrieval to support clinical research. Our study demonstrated that optical character recognition software provides an effective mechanism to transform scanned electronic medical record images to allow the application of natural language processing, yielding highly accurate data abstraction. We conclude that our optical character recognition/natural language processing pipeline can greatly facilitate research data abstraction by providing a highly focused data review, eliminating unnecessary manual review of the entire chart, and thus freeing time for abstracting other data elements requiring more human interpretation.