COVID-19 SignSym: A fast adaptation of general clinical NLP tools to identify and normalize COVID-19 signs and symptoms to OMOP common data model

The COVID-19 pandemic swept across the world rapidly infecting millions of people. An efficient tool that can accurately recognize important clinical concepts of COVID-19 from free text in electronic health records will be significantly valuable to accelerate various applications of COVID-19 research. To this end, the existing clinical NLP tool CLAMP was quickly adapted to COVID-19 information and generated an automated tool called COVID-19 SignSym, which can extract and signs/symptoms and their eight attributes such as temporal information and negations from clinical text. The extracted information is also mapped to standard clinical concepts in the common data model of OHDSI OMOP. Evaluation on clinical notes and medical dialogues demonstrated promising results. It is freely accessible to the community as a downloadable package of APIs (https://clamp.uth.edu/covid/nlp.php). We believe COVID-19 SignSym will provide fundamental supports to the secondary use of EHRs, thus accelerating the global research of COVID-19.