Using nurses' natural language entries to build a concept-oriented terminology for patients' chief complaints in the emergency department

Information about the chief complaint (CC), also known as the patient's reason for seeking emergency care, is critical for patient prioritization for treatment and determination of patient flow through the emergency department (ED). Triage nurses document the CC at the start of the ED visit, and the data are increasingly available in electronic form. Despite the clinical and operational significance of the CC to the ED, there is no standard CC terminology. We propose the construction of concept-oriented nursing terminologies from the actual language used by experts. We use text analysis to extract CC concepts from triage nurses' natural language entries. Our methodology for building the nursing terminology utilizes natural language processing techniques and the Unified Medical Language System. (C) 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.