Can antiepileptic drug efficacy be studied from electronic health records? A review of current approaches

As automated data extraction and natural language processing (NLP) are rapidly evolving, applicability to harness large data to improve healthcare delivery is garnering great interest. Assessing antiepileptic drug (AED) efficacy remains a barrier to improving epilepsy care. In this review, we examined automatic electronic health record (EHR) extraction methodologies pertinent to epilepsy examining AED efficacy. We also reviewed more generalizable NLP pipelines to extract other critical patient variables. Our review found varying reports of performance measures. Whereas automated data extraction pipelines are a crucial advancement, this review calls attention to standardizing NLP methodology and accuracy reporting for greater generalizability. Moreover, the use of crowdsourcing competitions to spur innovative NLP pipelines would further advance this field.