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Medical Field to Invest Heavily in NLP

The global healthcare natural language processing market, which includes machine translation, automatic summarization, information extraction, and text and voice processing, is expected to be worth $4.3 billion by the end of 2024, up from $936 million in 2015, according to research from Transparency Market Research. The firm expects the global market to rise at a compound annual growth rate of 18.8 percent through 2024.

The top three players in the global healthcare natural language processing market held a share of 41 percent in 2015. IBM, Apple, and Microsoft emerged as the leading players due to ongoing investments in research and development of NLP technologies for healthcare. In the coming years, players are expected to focus on delivering text mining, advanced analytics, and cognitive intelligence for efficient handling of healthcare data, states Transparency Market Research.

Analysts also found machine translation and information extraction collectively to dominate the market in 2016. However, in the forecast period, the text and voice processing segments are projected to exhibit the fastest CAGR, at 19.9 percent.

The growing adoption of advanced technologies to simplify clinical solutions is anticipated to boost the overall market. The increasing usage of electronic health records has created a humungous amount of raw data. This unstructured data about patients has created a significant need for healthcare natural language processing technologies, as NLP allows conversion of unstructured data into structured, making the documentation process meaningful.

Streamlining processes in the healthcare industry by adopting NLP will also bring down overall costs. The new methods have eliminated conventional ways of documentation, which, in turn, has made record keeping more efficient and effective, TMR concludes.

The exhaustive medical vocabulary, medical concepts, and abbreviations, which are continuously increasing, have created the biggest challenge for the global healthcare natural language processing market, the firm points out.


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