Systems and methods for enhancing natural language processing

Methods and systems for enhanced natural language processing of clinical documentation are provided. Using natural language processing, a clinical condition is extracted from unstructured data within a current electronic document. A clinical ontology identifying itemsets associated with the clinical condition is retrieved, and indicators of relevant clinical concepts, as identified from the ontology, are searched from within the patient's longitudinal record, which comprises documentation from at least a prior encounter. Based on the whether the clinical concepts are present in the patent's record, a confidence is assigned to the NLP-extracted clinical condition, and one or more actions may be performed.