CloudMedx, a big data health analytics company, has acquired Gyrus Labs to extend its CloudMedx Analytics Platform, which is designed to help improve patient care through data insights. CloudMedx acquired the Gyrus Labs team along with the company's IP and data rights, and already has integrated the Gyrus Labs technology into the CloudMedx platform.

"CloudMedx resolves two major paint points for healthcare organizations: achieving quality and dealing with revenue pressure," said Tashfeen Suleman, co-founder and CEO of CloudMedx. "Healthcare is moving toward value-based care, and payment models are becoming more performance-driven. As this is happening, healthcare needs something more than retrospective analytics that is just based on claims data, which is a few weeks to months old, and by that time patients have gone in and out of health systems multiple times."

The solution to this problem, Suleman said, is prospective and predictive analytics that studies historical trends and predicts future patterns to optimize physician performance and improve an organization's bottom line.

"This requires data from multiple points including electronic health records, claims, patient-reported outcomes, lab systems and pharmacy systems," Suleman said. "CloudMedx taps into these traditional sources but goes a step further, providing the ability to peek inside doctors' notes that are hidden in IT workflows such as clinical summaries, discharge summaries, SOAP notes and more, through its natural language processing engine. The CloudMedx engine reads and understands these notes and predicts trends and outcomes."

On the clinical side, organizations and clinicians can identify currently sick patients and patients who are at risk of illness and plan accordingly; and on the executive side, leadership can identify its high-performing physicians and units, and boost population health efforts, Suleman said.

"At present, a lot of population health programs are providing retrospective analysis that is reactive and based on claims data that is months old, which introduces gaps in care, avoidable readmissions, misdiagnosis, and unnecessarily high utilization and low performance of doctors," Suleman said. "There is a ton of healthcare data that is locked inside health systems and medical records. That data is hard to get and is not being utilized properly. It's a goldmine when it comes to early intervention and reducing clinical risk for patients."

Also with the acquisition of Gyrus Labs comes Dongyang Zhang, MD, a Gyrus cofounder who previously was one of the early researchers on the core team that created IBM Watson for health. He was the original medical scientist who helped the team adapt Watson to healthcare. He has assumed the role of CloudMedx senior medical scientist.