Research in healthcare informatics, natural language processing and understanding, information extraction, and textual inference has advanced considerably in recent years, resulting in powerful models that are able to facilitate clinical prediction tasks such as readmission prediction, diagnostic code group prediction, length-of-stay prediction, and others. The (first) special session on Healthcare Analytics and Language Processing (HeAL) held at FICTA 2020 is an interdisciplinary forum for researchers and industry experts interested in the domain of automated processing of healthcare documents.