ABSTRACT
Both conceptually and practically, the study of clinical language is central to informatics. Clinical languages are the building blocks from which we construct models of health and disease, and thus they exert their influence at the very foundations of clinical reasoning. Practically, language is important because so much of the clinical record is expressed in text or narrative. If one wishes to monitor population-level disease for public health surveillance, or simply audit clinical practice, there needs to be some way of condensing the content of clinical text into core concepts such as specific diseases, treatments and outcomes.
