Introduction:

The EASIER-COHORT project aims to automatically create patient cohorts for epidemiological studies. It focuses on extracting information from patient electronic medical records to identify populations in need of influenza screening, using natural language processing techniques.

The project will use the systematic influenza screening policy during the COVID-19 pandemic at Hospices Civils de Lyon (HCL) to compare the characteristics of patients testing positive for influenza before and during the pandemic. This will help identify populations at risk of influenza infections not previously tested.

This project aims to reduce the costs and time of manual annotation of medical records and to facilitate the creation of future cohorts, in particular with the establishment of the HCL health data warehouse. Applied to case detection, the project’s results could contribute to the prediction of future pandemics.