  Electronic health records (EHRs), digital collections of patient healthcare
events and observations, are ubiquitous in medicine and critical to healthcare
delivery, operations, and research. Despite this central role, EHRs are
notoriously difficult to process automatically. Well over half of the
information stored within EHRs is in the form of unstructured text (e.g.
provider notes, operation reports) and remains largely untapped for secondary
use. Recently, however, newer neural network and deep learning approaches to
Natural Language Processing (NLP) have made considerable advances,
outperforming traditional statistical and rule-based systems on a variety of
tasks. In this survey paper, we summarize current neural NLP methods for EHR
applications. We focus on a broad scope of tasks, namely, classification and
prediction, word embeddings, extraction, generation, and other topics such as
question answering, phenotyping, knowledge graphs, medical dialogue,
multilinguality, interpretability, etc.
