TN-TIES: A system for extracting temporal information from emergency department triage notes

The triage note field of the Emergency Department (ED) patient record describes the reason for the patient's visit, including specific symptoms and incidents. Here we present the Triage Note Temporal Information Extraction System (TN-TIES), which systematically processes triage note text and outputs a human and machine readable interpretation of the timing of the events leading up to the ED visit. TN-TIES consists of chunking, classification, and interpretation processing stages. The results at each stage are promising. This system is a first step towards a complete interpretation and timeline presentation of all events that occurred before a patients visit to the ED, which could help clinicians, public health officials, and others understand and visualize the data.