The University of Pittsburgh School of the Health Sciences (UPMC) has announced the launch of Realyze Intelligence, a company that uses AI and natural language processing to identify precise patient populations with chronic diseases and cancer.
Founded in partnership with UPMC Enterprises, the entrepreneurial extension of UPMC, Realyze stakeholders aim to use their platform to read EHR data to pick out cohorts of patients with precise conditions who may be at a higher risk for negative health outcomes. The platform’s analysis will allow physicians to prioritize individuals who need the most urgent medical attention.
“Patients aren't defined by their primary diagnosis,” said Gilan El Saadawi, M.D., Ph.D., Realyze chief medical officer. “They are not just dealing with that one condition, but also many other factors that make them complex, and it currently is a manual, time-consuming effort to extract and use the relevant information from the EMR to ensure effective care. Realyze streamlines this process and quickly decodes the patient’s ‘story’ so they get the best care.”
In looking through detailed notes and data, the platform can get a holistic view of the entire patient and their history, not just the chronic condition they are being treated for at the moment. The dynamic platform can be deployed within a provider’s workflow, making the solution effective for a variety of patient conditions, including various cancers, chronic kidney disease (CKD), diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. The U.S. health care industry spends $8.7 billion per year employing people primarily to read clinical notes to abstract data for various clinical workflows.
“For providers to give the most effective care, they need a complete understanding of their patients and all of their comorbidities. Realyze helps them find specific patients and intervene at the correct time with the correct treatment,” said Aaron Brauser, Realyze president and chief executive officer. “This can improve a patient’s overall health while hospitals benefit from avoidance of unplanned events and reduction of abstraction costs.”
According to UPMC, in an analysis of more than 100,000 CKD patients at UPMC, Realyze enhanced the work done by UPMC’s clinical analytics team by deriving new insights from clinical notes that were not available in the structured data. With this information, UPMC will improve its ability to implement more precise patient segmentation, which, in turn, will allow clinicians to better deploy resources for more appropriate care.
“Realyze’s ability to assess massive amounts of unstructured data has added new dimension and depth to the analyses we do, making them even more useful for our clinicians as they deliver life-changing medicine to the communities we serve,” said Oscar C. Marroquin, M.D., UPMC’s chief health care data and analytics officer.
Photo by alvarez/GettyImages