Natural Language Processing Markets Set to Grow in Healthcare

Natural language processing (NLP) is quickly becoming one of the foundational big data technologies that will allow healthcare to move forward with complex analytics, according to a series of market reports predicting significant growth for NLP products over the next few years. As healthcare organizations seek new strategies for extracting insights from unstructured data from electronic health records, Internet of Things devices, imaging studies, and elsewhere, they will create an NLP marketplace worth $2.65 billion by 2021, says ReportsnReports. "The market is growing rapidly because of the huge surge in clinical data, increasing use of connected devices, and evolving consumer needs," the report says. Natural language processing may play an instrumental role in precision medicine, predictive analytics, population health management, clinical decision support, and EHR documentation improvement. The NLP market is divided into several segments: interactive voice response and speech analytics technologies, optical character recognition (OCR), automatic coding, text analytics, and pattern and image recognition.