medExtractR

A medication extraction algorithm for electronic health records using the R programming language | Objective: We developed medExtractR, a natural language processing system to extract medication dose and timing information from clinical notes. Our system facilitates creation of medication-specific research datasets from electronic health records. Materials and Methods: Written using the R programming language, medExtractR combines lexicon dictionaries and regular expression patterns to identify relevant medication information ('drug entities'). The system is designed to extract particular medications of interest, rather than all possible medications mentioned in a clinical note. MedExtractR was developed on notes from Vanderbilt University's Synthetic Derivative, using two medications (tacrolimus and lamotrigine) prescribed with varying complexity, and with a third drug (allopurinol) used for testing generalizability of results