Identification of inactive medications in narrative physician notes.

Information about inactive medications is important for patient safety but is frequently missing from the electronic medical record. We investigated the feasibility of extracting this information from narrative physician notes. Our analysis of 298 physician notes showed that 1 in 3 notes contains documentation of medication discontinuation. This documentation can be described by one of six semantic fields. Documentation of inactive medications is common in narrative documents and could potentially be extracted using semantic analysis.