REMOTE: A Framework to Create Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) from Unstructured Clinical Data

Abstract

Free text in clinical notes represents a rich but underutilized source of patient information within electronic health records (EHRs). However, its unstructured nature poses major challenges for use in population health, genomic research, precision medicine, quality improvement, and clinical decision support.This study introduces REMOTE, a systematic framework for generating Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) from unstructured clinical notes. REMOTE is a stepwise pipeline that Reformats clinical notes, Extracts key medical concepts, Maps those concepts to standardized Ontologies, Transforms them into FHIR resources, and enables Exchange across health data repositories. We demonstrate the feasibility of this framework by processing 1,618 unstructured clinical notes, extracting chief complaints, signs and symptoms, diagnoses, and medications, mapping them to SNOMED CT codes, converting them into FHIR Observation, Condition, and MedicationRequest resources, and uploading them into FHIR repositories for data exchange.Clinical Relevance - Information embedded in free-text clinical notes can be made interoperable, exchangeable, and actionable through transformation into discrete FHIR resources.

Department(s)

Cooperative Engineering Program

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

DOI

10.1109/EMBC58623.2025.11253981

Keywords

clinical notes, data interoperability, electronic health records, FHIR, health information exchange, large language models, normalization, standardization

Publication Date

1-1-2025

Journal Title

Proceedings of the Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society EMBS

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