Recovery Medication from Free Text to a Structured Form.

We studied methods to convert medical prescriptions in free text to a structured form for pharmacy insructions and planning nursing activities in hospitalized patients. We compared Natural Language Processing (NLP) with Parsing Process (PP), both for the Spanish language. We studied 87,750 and processed 65,000 prescriptions and recovered 62% and 65% with NLP and PP to a structured format respectively. The difference between the methods is significant (p < 0.001) and further work is needed to determine if combining them will have higher performance.