Natural Language Processing Supporting Interoperability in Healthcare

Improving personal health (care) for pervasive and ubiquitous health services requires the involvement of principals with different skills, education, social, cultural, ethical and legal background. They have to cooperate and communicate the necessary information in an interoperable way, so that the information can be used on all sides. The resulting necessary interoperability among human beings and of course systems requires the management and communication of knowledge. This knowledge management should be based on appropriate and hopefully shared ontologies. Natural languages are an efficient and powerful means in representing meaning, knowledge and skills. They balance between special sentence structures and generative flexibility, allowing for unambiguous representation of real world concepts used in communication. This paper provides an overview of the current state of the art functionality in NLP with regard to its application in health information systems interoperability. Therefore this paper deals less with an in-depth analysis of the methodologies currently developed in NLP and rather motivates for using NLP in real-life use cases.