The use of natural language processing to identify vaccine-related anaphylaxis at five health care systems in the Vaccine Safety Datalink.

The current study demonstrated the potential to apply rule-based NLP algorithms to clinical notes to identify anaphylaxis cases. Increasing the size of training data, including clinical notes from all participating study sites in the training data, and preprocessing the clinical notes to handle special characters could improve the performance of the NLP algorithms. We recommend adding an NLP process followed by manual chart review in future vaccine safety studies to improve sensitivity and efficiency.