Automatically Detecting Likely Edits in Clinical Notes Created Using Automatic Speech Recognition

The use of automatic speech recognition (ASR) to create clinical notes has the potential to reduce costs associated with note creation for electronic medical records, but at current system accuracy levels, post-editing by practitioners is needed to ensure note quality. Aiming to reduce the time required to edit ASR transcripts, this paper investigates novel methods for automatic detection of edit regions within the transcripts, including both putative ASR errors but also regions that are targets for cleanup or rephrasing. We create detection models using logistic regression and conditional random field models, exploring a variety of text-based features that consider the structure of clinical notes and exploit the medical context. Different medical text resources are used to improve feature extraction. Experimental results on a large corpus of practitioner-edited clinical notes show that 67% of sentence-level edits and 45% of word-level edits can be detected with a false detection rate of 15%.