Figure 1.

An electronic health record using structured narrative consists of four primary modules that communicate with supporting modules (arrows indicate the flow of information): Import (acquisition of documents from an external system); Authoring (creation of new documents by a clinician); Browsing (search and presentation of documents in a patient’s electronic health record); and Export (transmission of documents to an external system). Import and Authoring use the Storage module to create new clinical documents, and use NLP to semantically annotate the document. Authoring, Browsing and Export use the Retrieval module to extract documents from a patient’s electronic health record. These modules also use Retrieval to access concepts in the document ontology and the Inference module to reason about concepts.