Information Extraction

Hospital notes are not databases that forgot to wear a spreadsheet costume. They are fragments of care: treatment names, planned cycles, delayed doses, discontinued regimens, relative dates, typos, abbreviations, and the occasional phrase that looks obvious until two clinicians disagree about what it actually means. For oncology, that mess matters. A chemotherapy timeline is not just a historical summary; it is the skeleton of a patient’s treatment journey. Get the timeline wrong, and downstream systems may misunderstand what was given, when it started, when it ended, and whether a patient fits a registry, audit, research cohort, or trial-matching rule. ...

Accuracy is a seductive number. It is tidy, executive-friendly, and easy to put in a slide deck. A model gets 82% accuracy, someone says “good enough,” and suddenly a clinical workflow is being “transformed.” Healthcare, as usual, has a way of punishing this kind of optimism. Not loudly at first. Quietly. Through false negatives, silent majority-class prediction, and a dashboard that looks reassuring until someone asks the rude question: what exactly did the model miss? ...