Exploratory analysis of the medical record.

Current patient information systems such as SCAMP have the capacity to store not only highly-structured information such as problem codes, drug lists and laboratory values, but also richer, clinically-descriptive information such as comprehensive natural language problem summaries and other textual data that retain the full clinical information used by physicians in managing their patients. The clinical importance, richness, and extensiveness of this information suggest that techniques which allow computers to process textual data may play a helpful role in clinical research. The analysis programs of the SCAMP system have been developed to explore the potential of this approach.