This paper describes part of an ongoing effort to improve the readability of Swedish electronic health records (EHRs). An EHR contains systematic documentation of a single patient’s medical history across time, entered by healthcare professionals with the purpose of enabling safe and informed care. Linguistically, medical records exemplify a highly specialised domain, which can be superficially...

Phonologists and psycholinguists draw a three-way distinction amongst real words, possible words, and impossible words.The distinction between real words and possible words provides the foundation for lexical decision experiments. The distinction between possible words and impossible words reveals implicit cognitive generalizations about words in a language, and thereby contributes to the under...

fast and holistic access to the patients’ clinical record is a major requirement of modern medical decision support systems (dss). while electronic health records (ehrs) have replaced the traditional paper-based records in most healthcare organization, the data entry into these systems remains largely manual. speech recognition technology promises substitution of the more convenient speech-base...

Medical books bristle with difficult-looking terminology such as epistaxis and osteomyelitis. Why are the words so difficult to understand? Why does a physician take the effort to write “epistaxis” on a chart rather than “a bloody nose,” which is the more common term? Medical personnel learn and use special language, not to make communication harder, but to make it easier. The terms of this lan...

There is a constant need to extend and tune medical vocabularies to account for new words and new word usages. Robust natural language processing (NLP) tools can be applied to medical texts corpora such as patient narratives and help collect and analyze unknown words1,2. The aim of the present work is to assess the potential for classifying unknown words based on the semantic categories of “nei...