Fever Detection in Clinic Visit Notes Using a General Purpose Processor

With increased penetration of clinical information system products and increased interest in clinical data exchange, a variety of clinician’s notes are becoming available for surveillance. Chief complaints have been studied extensively, and emergency department notes have received attention, but narrative clinic visit notes have gotten little attention.

Objective

To assess the performance of an unmodified, general purpose natural language processing system to detect fever, and to assess the feasibility of parsing visit notes for syndromic surveillance.