  As more healthcare organisations transition to using electronic health record
(EHR) systems it is important for these organisations to maximise the secondary
use of their data to support service improvement and clinical research. These
organisations will find it challenging to have systems which can mine
information from the unstructured data fields in the record (clinical notes,
letters etc) and more practically have such systems interact with all of the
hospitals data systems (legacy and current). To tackle this problem at
University College London Hospitals, we have deployed an enhanced version of
the CogStack platform; an information retrieval platform with natural language
processing capabilities which we have configured to process the hospital's
existing and legacy records. The platform has improved data ingestion
capabilities as well as better tools for natural language processing. To date
we have processed over 18 million records and the insights produced from
CogStack have informed a number of clinical research use cases at the
hospitals.
