CiOX announced a new data platform, HealthSource, to help health systems meet some of the challenges of last-mile clinical interoperability. 

Company officials said the new artificial intelligence and machine learning tools power capabilities that can help providers manage the access and exchange of disparate types of health data.

The new tools come as more and more hospitals are deploying AI in novel ways. The American Medical Association, in fact, said that AI is coming to doctor’s offices and now is the time to prepare. Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women’s also just revealed plans to apply AI to both medical records and imaging, while Tampa General stood up an AI command center to streamline operations and Mount Sinai partnered with startup RenalytixAI to improve kidney disease care. And those developments just happened with the last couple weeks. 

Applying AI to the more basic problem of interoperability allows HealthSource to do two things hospitals might appreciate, according to CiOX: first enabling easier flow of health information, then helping with management of structured and unstructured records.

The HealthSource platform offers distributed, HITRUST-compliant health data exchange services, allowing hospitals to more efficiently locate and access data nationwide. Its integrated, workflow engine helps with end-to-end management and traceability of records.

The platform also offers optical character recognition software, alongside handwriting recognition and natural language processing tools to assist clinicians with digital conversion and use of unstructured data

Machine learning technology layered on top of it all allows for what CiOX calls a "continuous learning loop" for more accurate clinical data that requires less manual intervention.

CiOX has also just released other new tools to work in tandem with HealthSource – among them one called Clarity, which aims to provides transparency into the release of information process, helping hospitals get a better handle on who is requesting clinical data and enabling the secure and accurate delivery of medical records to those authorized to request them.

CiOX's new Smart Chart and Vault, meanwhile, work with HealthSource and are targeted toward payers, life science companies, government agencies and others that need access to multiple types of clinical data. Smart Chart applies AI and NLP to help extract relevant data from EHRs and aggregate it into a longitudinal digital profile; Vault allows for a central data repository. 

"Technologies such as artificial intelligence are now table stakes for digital organizations, and they are true transformative forces for the healthcare industry," said CiOX CEO Paul Roma in a statement. "We believe that when clinical data can move easily and transparently between stakeholders that the entire health system works better, and most importantly, doctors and patients benefit.”

Roma said the new suite of applications are meant to integrate "advanced and highly secured technologies into authorized medical data sharing operations," offering healthcare organizations an improvement over the "costly and obsolete way health information is accessed and consumed today."

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