Tech Companies Aim to Expand Use of Data Analytics in Healthcare
In a series of partnerships and acquisitions, tech companies and provider organizations are moving to enhance data analytics in healthcare.
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By Jessica Kent
- For years, data analytics in healthcare has been a frequent buzzword among industry leaders. The ability to leverage AI, machine learning, and other technologies to gain actionable insights from massive amounts of data is an exciting prospect, but one that has been notoriously difficult to realize.
With the onset of the pandemic, healthcare was forced to come face-to-face with its many data challenges, from collection to accuracy and analysis. In response, the industry has ramped up its efforts to improve data analytics capabilities – with tech companies playing a major role.
These collaborations between provider and academic institutions and vendor organizations could translate into more front-facing AI tools, advancing the use of data analytics in healthcare.
Mayo Clinic partners with nference, Commure to launch data analytics companies
One of the most significant areas of growth since the dawn of COVID-19 has been the use of mHealth and remote patient monitoring technologies.
Combined with analytics tools, these devices have the potential to improve treatments and outcomes for high-risk patients.
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Mayo Clinic recently announced the launch of a new mHealth tool, the Remote Diagnostic and Management Platform (RDMP). The platform connects devices to AI resources to help providers with clinical decision support and diagnoses.
To market the new platform, Mayo Clinic is also launching two new data analytics companies.
The first, Anumana Inc., will create and bring to market innovative digital sensor diagnostics. Created with AI-driven health technology company nference, Anumana will initially focus on building state-of-the-art neural network algorithms based on billions of pieces of relevant health data in Mayo Clinic’s Clinical Data Analytics Platform.
The company will combine remote patient monitoring and analytics technology to enable early detection and treatment of heart disease.
"Undiagnosed heart disease affects millions of Americans and people across the globe. For many conditions, such as a weak or thickened heart pump, or silent arrhythmias, effective evidence-based treatments exist that can prevent heart failure, stroke, or death,” said Paul Friedman, MD, chair of the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, who led the team that developed the algorithms.
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“The key is to detect the disease before symptoms develop to prevent these events from happening. The addition of AI to the electrocardiogram, a ubiquitous and inexpensive point-of-care test that is already integrated into medical workflows, makes this approach good for patients, convenient for clinicians, and massively scalable."
Lucem Health Inc., Mayo Clinic’s second company, will provide the overall platform for connecting remote patient monitoring devices with AI algorithms. Together with Commure, a portfolio technology company, Mayo Clinic established Lucem to integrate diagnostic insights generated by AI algorithms into clinical workflows.
UF Health and NVIDIA team up to develop healthcare NLP
In addition to remote patient monitoring, healthcare leaders are looking to enhance the use of natural language processing (NLP) tools to unlock valuable information stored in clinical notes.
Researchers at University of Florida Health recently partnered with NVIDIA to create the GatorTron Language Model, an algorithm that leverages NLP to quickly extract insights from huge amounts of clinical data.
“GatorTron™ is an exceptional example of the discoveries that happen when experts in academia and industry collaborate using leading-edge artificial intelligence and world-class computing resources. said David R. Nelson, MD, senior vice president for health affairs at UF and president of UF Health.
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“Our partnership with NVIDIA is crucial to UF emerging as a destination for artificial intelligence expertise and development in health research.”
To develop the tool, UF Health researchers supplied ten years of anonymized data from more than two million patients and 50 million patient interactions across a range of medical specialties, including oncology and critical care.
The team believes the model points to the promise of NLP in healthcare. With this kind of technology, providers may be able to develop predictive models and reduce the risks associated with surgery – providing an opportunity for clinicians to proactively manage that risk.
“GatorTron™ leveraged over a decade of electronic medical records to develop a state-of-the-art model,” said Joseph Glover, PhD, UF Provost.
“A tool of this scale enables researchers in all fields to tackle and solve challenging real-world problems previously intractable with old technology. Our test results are preliminary and subject to independent verification, but we are very excited by what we’ve seen so far.”
Olive acquires Intermountain spinoff Empiric Health
Healthcare-based tech companies are also looking to expand the scope of AI in the operating room.
Olive’s recent acquisition of Empiric Health, a clinical analytics company derived from Intermountain Healthcare, will introduce new capabilities for supply chain and clinical analysis for surgeries.
The move signifies AI’s increasing emergence in front-end care delivery, a trend that will shape healthcare experiences going forward.
“It is exciting to see the evolution of Empiric Health’s clinical analytics platform since originating from an Intermountain Healthcare Program in 2012,” said Rick Adam, CEO of Empiric Health. “Today the AI-powered solution is changing physician behavior and improving surgical results across the country.”
