The idea of trawling the internet to discover what people think about medications is a fascinating one and I've covered some attempts to do this in the past, but it's not easy. And there's something worrying about where it could lead.
A new paper aims to trawl medical records to work out how well depressed patients responded to treatment. The authors used Natural Language Processing or NLP (not that NLP) to interpret electronic medical records from over 5,000 patients treated at hospitals in New England. Each record included notes taken at multiple visits.
A crack team of "three experienced board-certi?ed clinical psychiatrists" reviewed the notes and provided a "Gold Standard" classification as to whether patients were Depressed, Recovered or Intermediate at each visit. The problem here is that they didn't actually see the patients, they just had the notes. If the notes were bad, the result will have been bad ...
