What is natural language processing (NLP) used for in clinical settings?

Clinical NLP enables extraction of information from unstructured free text (which contains 60-80% of clinically meaningful information). Key tasks include named entity recognition (extracting diagnoses, medications), relation extraction, text classification (triaging referrals, coding), temporal reasoning, and summarisation. NHS deployments include CogStack for real-time EHR text processing and AI-assisted clinical coding automation.