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We have therefore asked whether similar power law behaviours could be seen in data from electronic patient records.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Results<\/jats:title><jats:p>In order to examine this question, anonymised data were obtained from all general practices in Salford covering a seven year period and captured in the form of Read codes. It was found that data for patient diagnoses and procedures followed Zipf\u2019s law. However, the medication data behaved very differently, looking much more like a referential index. We also observed differences in the statistical behaviour of the language used to describe patient diagnosis as a function of an anonymised GP practice identifier.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title>Conclusions<\/jats:title><jats:p>This works demonstrate that data from electronic patient records does follow Zipf\u2019s law. We also found significant differences in Zipf\u2019s law behaviour in data from different GP practices. This suggests that computational linguistic techniques could become a useful additional tool to help understand and monitor the data quality of health records.<\/jats:p><\/jats:sec>","DOI":"10.1186\/2041-1480-5-2","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2014,1,10]],"date-time":"2014-01-10T20:01:21Z","timestamp":1389384081000},"update-policy":"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":4,"title":["The languages of health in general practice electronic patient records: a Zipf\u2019s law analysis"],"prefix":"10.1186","volume":"5","author":[{"given":"Leila R","family":"Kalankesh","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"John P","family":"New","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Patricia G","family":"Baker","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]},{"given":"Andy","family":"Brass","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"role":"author","vocabulary":"crossref"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2014,1,10]]},"reference":[{"key":"199_CR1","first-page":"871","volume":"48","author":"D Mant","year":"1998","unstructured":"Mant D: R & D in primary care: an NHS Priority. 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