ABSTRACT
Over the last decade there has been widespread use of medical information systems and an explosive growth of medical databases. The system provided an 87% accuracy diagnosis and is currently being tested to detect skin cancer. As the healthcare industry faces a rapidly changing data environment, it is vital that healthcare organizations become data driven. Text mining is a data mining methodology intended to extract meaningful information from unstructured textual data. One recent study reported that an estimated 80% of a healthcare organization's information is contained in an unstructured textual format. Text mining converts the unstructured data into a structured resource that can be used for analysis purposes. Several recently published studies illustrate the use of text mining in the healthcare field to alert healthcare professionals to potential epidemics, hospital readmissions, and drug safety.
