Future Direction of Healthcare: Leverage Text Analytics to Identify Health Information Technology Trends

Abstract

Rapid advancement of healthcare technologies and service models have prompted researchers and healthcare providers strive to provide patients with more personalized, accessible health information. These improved tools also support providers in managing and organizing patient information. A preliminary list of health information technology (IT) suggested by Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) includes computerized disease registries, computerized provider order entry, consumer health IT applications (e.g., mobile applications), electronic medical record systems (EMRs, EHRs, and PHRs), and telehealth. The broadening types of health IT support patients and providers with the ultimate goal of improved overall safety and health outcomes. Given the expansion of types of health IT, we are interested in understanding evolving trends in health IT, which will inform researchers and healthcare providers the direction in which health IT is moving. The overarching goal of this work is to explore a preliminary analytical approach for identifying main themes or keywords of clinical or consumer health IT journal and conference articles in the past five years. The proposed analytical framework is text analytics, which can be seen as a set of data mining methods to extract information from text. This method has been applied widely in the fields of news and social media analyses. It applies a series of statistical models and data mining techniques to efficiently identify popular search terms and topics.