  Employing a machine learning approach we predict, up to 24 hours prior, a
diagnosis of severe sepsis. Strongly predictive models are possible that use
only text reports from the Electronic Health Record (EHR), and omit structured
numerical data. Unstructured text alone gives slightly better performance than
structured data alone, and the combination further improves performance. We
also discuss advantages of using unstructured EHR text for modeling, as
compared to structured EHR data.
