Title
A Natural Language Processing Approach to Acquire Accurate Health Provider Directory Information
Abstract
Introduction Accurate information in provider directories are vital in health care including health information exchange, health benefits exchange, quality reporting, and in the reimbursement and delivery of care. Maintaining provider directory data and keeping it up to date is challenging. The objective of this study is to determine the feasibility of using NLP techniques to combine disparate resources and acquire accurate information on health providers. Methods Publically available state licensure lists in Connecticut were obtained along with National Plan and Provider Enumeration System (NPPES) public use files. Connecticut licensure lists textual information of each health professional who is licensed to practice within the state. A NLP-based system was developed based on Healthcare Provider Taxonomy code, location, and name and address information to identify textual data within the state and federal records. Qualitative and quantitative evaluation were performed, and the recall and precision were calculated. Results We identified nurse midwives, nurse practitioners, and dentists in the State of Connecticut. The recall and precision were 0.95 and 0.93 respectively. Using the system, we were able to accurately acquire 6,849 of the 7,177 records of health provider directory information. Conclusion The authors demonstrated that the NLP based approach was effective at acquiring health provider information. Furthermore, the NLP-based system can be re-applied on the updated information further reducing processing burdens as data changes.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ICHI-W.2018.00027
2018 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics Workshop (ICHI-W)
Keywords
Field
DocType
natural language processing,health provider directory information
Health care,Computer science,Textual information,Directory,Precision and recall,Licensure,Public use,Natural language processing,Artificial intelligence,Reimbursement,Health information exchange
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-5386-6778-1
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Matthew Cook110010.77
Lixia Yao2459.63
Xiaoyan Wang311.04