Health Catalyst, Regenstrief partner to commercialize natural language processing technology
Health Catalyst and the Regenstrief Institute are working together to commercialize nDepth, Regenstrief’s natural language processing technology.
nDepth is an acronym for NLP Data Extraction Providing Targeted Healthcare. Indianapolis-based Regenstrief developed the technology to harness unstructured data.
Salt-Lake City-based Health Catalyst, a data warehousing and analytics company, has been in the business of extracting data to boost care quality since it launched in 2008.
Regenstrief’s nDepth is artificial intelligence-powered text analytics technology. It was developed within the Indiana Health Information Exchange, the largest and oldest HIE in the country.
Regenstrief fine-tuned nDepth through extensive and repeated use, searching more than 230 million text records from more than 17 million patients.
The goal of the partnership is to speed improvements in patient care by unlocking the unstructured data within electronic health records.
Health Catalyst will incorporate nDepth into its data analytics platform in use by health systems that together serve 85 million patients across the country.
“Eighty percent of clinical data is locked away in unstructured physician notes that can’t be read by an EHR and so can’t be accessed by advanced decision support and quality improvement applications,” Peter Embi, MD, president and CEO of Regenstrief Institute, said in a statement. “We will help millions of patients benefit from the untapped potential hidden within unstructured data.”
Memorial Hospital at Gulfport, in Gulfport, Miss., served as the co-development partner and first deployment site for Health Catalyst’s integration of nDepth. The 445-bed not-for-profit health system deployed the Health Catalyst data and analytics platform in 2014.
nDepth analyzes any document type to mine the unstructured data for insights for clinicians and quality improvement professionals. The technology employs Natural Language Processing – a combination of linguistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning –to derive meaning from text.
nDepth enhances these foundational technologies with clinical domain expertise and phenotype libraries built and curated by clinicians.
Some recent applications of nDepth include finding patients with metastatic melanoma, identifying pre-diabetic patients for clinical trials, and capturing hypoglycemic events.
Health Catalyst and Regenstrief announced the partnership at HIMSS17 last week in Orlando.
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