Automatic generation of a national diabetes register from outpatient records
In this paper, we present the construction of Bulgarian National Diabetes Register, using pseudonymized outpatient records submitted to the Bulgarian National Health Insurance Fund. The automatic generation facilitates the construction because it does not burden any medical experts with additional paper work. The Register is a healthcare system integrating natural language processing in large scale and analytics functionalities that provide new views to the information concerning Diabetes Mellitus and diabetic patients in Bulgaria. This successful approach encouraged the authors to initiate a research programme in eHealth focused on collection and analysis of patient data, with the intention to assess the feasibility of secondary patient record use in evaluation of healthcare quality.