The Emergency Medical Text Processor (EMT-P) is a software system that cleans emergency department chief complaint (CC) text (e.g., chst pn, CP, c/p, chest pai, chert pain, chest/abd pain, chest discomfort) in order to extract standard terms (e.g., chest pain). The system addresses acronyms, abbreviations, misspellings, various uses of punctuation, coordinate constructions, and other patterns of natural language in order to maximize extraction of standard terms. The standard terms are then available for primary and secondary uses such as clinical care, research, administrative tracking, and public health and bioterrorism surveillance.

EMT-P was developed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The system is available as open source software. EMT-P includes a controller program written in Java, text processing modules written in Perl, and a database populated with data from the Unified Medical Language System ?.

File Number: 04-0098