Extraction of Medication Information from Clinical Text

Function and support for medication and dosing information extraction from free-text clinical notes. Medication entities for the basic medExtractR implementation that can be extracted include drug name, strength, dose amount, dose, frequency, intake time, dose change, and time of last dose. The basic medExtractR is outlined in Weeks, Beck, McNeer, Williams, Bejan, Denny, Choi (2020) . The extended medExtractR_tapering implementation is intended to extract dosing information for more tapering schedules, which are far more complex. The tapering extension allows for the extraction of additional entities including dispense amount, refills, dose schedule, time keyword, transition, and preposition.

medExtractR

The medExtractR package provides a tool to extract medication dosing information from free-text clinical notes. For a specified drug of interest, the system will identify drug entities such as strength, dose amount (units of the drug taken), frequency, or drug intake time.

Users will typically call the function medExtractR, specifying the drug names of interest for a clinical note. The medExtractR function also heavily relies on the extract_entities function, which focuses on identifying drug entities within a search window around the drug name.

Install from CRAN using install.packages("medExtractR").