HealthMyne, a Madison, Wisconsin-based radiology startup, is working with nearby Epic Systems and UW Health to integrate its informatics platform with electronic health record data.

[See also: Q&A: Epic President Carl Dvorak]

By getting a more efficient unified view of imaging and EHR information, radiologists will be able to capitalize on a "correlative, evidence-based population health model," HealthMyne officials say, treating individual patients with insights gained from similar patient cohorts.

"The benefits derived from seamless data interchange and aggregation is no doubt a valuable step forward," said Jeffrey Kanne, MD, professor of radiology and chief of thoracic imaging at University of Wisconsin, in a press statement announcing the partnership.

[See also: Imaging IT heads toward new phase]

"However, we expect even greater gains can be achieved by leveraging the data unification and moving into clinical and predictive analytics, including targeted patient cohort comparisons," he added. "Being able to data mine the imaging-derived properties native to HealthMyne, together with Epic's health record information, such as outcomes, should result in powerful decision support capabilities."

HealthMyne, a two-year-old startup that finalized its first round of outside funding with $4.5 million led by Madison-based VCs Venture Investors and 4490 Ventures investors earlier this year, aims to better integrate image data mining into clinical workflow.

Its diagnostic platform helps automate data capture and structured reports. By combining imaging and EHR data, clinicians can create integrated patient progression timelines and deploy analytics to compare patients to specific populations.

"HealthMyne is a model example of how applications can leverage Epic's open, standards-based interoperability platform to access the data they need from the EHR, said Epic President, Carl Dvorak, in a statement.

"Hospitals and cancer centers are generating lots and lots of information, and doctors don't want to spend all their time going through the information," HealthMyne CEO Praveen Sinha told the Wisconsin State Journal this March. "We are making it easier by extracting relevant, useful information... that may have very valuable assistance in charting the course of treatment for patients."

"HealthMyne provides an oncology-centric unified view that brings together automated quantitative imaging data sequentially interspersed with valuable health record information such as past chemotherapy, treatment procedures, lab results, medications, smoking history and clinical trial involvement," said Richard Bruce, MD, assistant professor of radiology and medical director of radiology informatics at University of Wisconsin.

"Automated comparison to similar cohorts allows image-based response stratification not previously possible in real-time," he added.