Using advanced natural language processing to facilitate documentation of meaningful use and quality payment compliance

PROJECT SUMMARY
The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Quality Payment Program is designed to motivate healthcare
providers to adhere to best practices in clinical healthcare and patient safetyUnfortunatelyextracting quality
measures data from the clinical record is burdensome and as suchparticipation among clinical healthcare
providers is suboptimalOur aim is to develop a system to facilitate automatic extraction of quality dataThis
will reduce the burden of data collection and help remove the barrier to participation that keeps more providers
from participating in the programThe proposed projecttitledUsing advanced natural language processing to facilitate documentation of
meaningful use and quality payment complianceaims to develop novel natural language processing
methods to recognize key elements from the clinical notes to enable proper documentation of meaningful use
and compliance with quality paymentWe envision this to be an effective research partnership that leverages the complementary assets of SaferMDa small business unitand the University of Michigana non profit research institutionto develop and evaluate
a prototype tool to extract clinical quality measures dataand increase participation in the Quality Payment
Program PROJECT NARRATIVE
The proposed projecttitledUsing advanced natural language processing to facilitate documentation of
meaningful use and quality payment complianceaims to develop novel natural language processing
methods to recognize key elements from the clinical notes to enable proper documentation of meaningful use
and compliance with quality paymentThe project will develop algorithms to identify fields relevant for quality
measures and develop tools to extract and analyze these data elements from large sets of radiology reportsFinallythe proposed work will initiate the extracted measures into existing quality service offerings by
SaferMDSuccessful completion of this project will advance the tools available for CMS clients to achieve
higher adherence and compliance to the quality payment initiatives and help public health officials and policy
developers advance the meaningful use of electronic health records