  The project aimed to define the rules and develop a technological solution to
automatically identify a set of attributes within free-text clinical records
written in Portuguese. The first application developed and implemented on this
basis was a structured summary of a patient's clinical history, including
previous diagnoses and procedures, usual medication, and relevant
characteristics or conditions for clinical decisions, such as allergies, being
under anticoagulant therapy, etc. The project's goal was achieved by a
multidisciplinary team that included clinicians, epidemiologists, computational
linguists, machine learning researchers and software engineers, bringing
together the expertise and perspectives of a public hospital, the university
and the private sector. Relevant benefits to users and patients are related
with facilitated access to the patient's history, which translates into
exhaustiveness in apprehending the patient's clinical past and efficiency due
to time saving.
