CliniWorks and Health Sciences South Carolina initiate research collaboration to advance healthcare data analytics
October 20, 2014
CAMBRIDGE, MA and COLUMBIA, SC – CliniWorks and Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) have entered into a collaborative research agreement to create and implement a centralized Natural Language Processing (NLP) system designed to improve healthcare and health research across multiple hospital networks.
As much as 70 percent of all healthcare data is locked in free text or exists as unstructured data. CliniWorks’ proprietary NLP, and related data processing technologies, will be used to convert this data into mineable structured data. This centralized NLP processing and enhancement to HSSC’s statewide Clinical Data Warehouse will greatly increase the capabilities of HSSC-affiliated health researchers and is a novel approach to distributed research data warehousing.
“This is an important step in broadening the dataset available to HSSC members, not only for health research, but also for improved healthcare,” said Dr. Leslie Lenert, HSSC Chief Medical Information Officer and MUSC SmartStateTM Endowed Chair in Medical Bioinformatics, who will serve as principal investigator for the project. “Our goal is to facilitate our members to perform studies that will lead to new knowledge that will be key to providing the best healthcare anywhere.”
The collaborative research partnership, based on CliniWorks’ Accel® data processing, AccelDWHTM data warehouse, and AccelFind® data mining technologies, will extract intelligence from historical and real-time clinical reports (such as visit notes, discharge summaries, emergency department notes, imaging/radiology reports and other unstructured reports) from HSSC supported organizations and deliver them to the HSSC Clinical Data Warehouse as well as to each contributing supported organization for clinical and research purposes across the network.
CliniWorks CEO Nitzan Sneh said, “We are very pleased to be part of this new research collaboration. It represents a unique opportunity to leverage CliniWorks’ novel data processing technology to extend HSSC’s mission to advance the research capabilities of its supported South Carolina healthcare institutions.”
CliniWorks was selected as an awardee due to the company’s expertise in medical data management and advanced data processing technology, including the flexibility of its system to process data from any source or format. The resulting enhanced HSSC Clinical Data Warehouse will greatly improve HSSC’s ability to serve as a statewide convener of grants and research initiatives, resulting in more grant and sponsored research for HSSC and its supported organizations.
Dr. Todd Thornburg, HSSC interim president and CEO, underscored the importance of this collaboration to the South Carolina healthcare and research community, as well as the state’s broader population. “This work will help Health Sciences South Carolina and its supported organizations fulfill its mission to improve health and wellbeing for all South Carolinians.”
The CliniWorks-HSSC agreement is facilitated by a recent South Carolina-Israel Collaborative Industry R&D grant—a collaboration between the South Carolina Research Authority (SCRA) and the Israeli Industry Center for R&D on behalf of the Office of the Chief Scientist in the Israeli Ministry of Economy (MATIMOP). Funds are awarded for projects that are likely to stimulate the development of new or significantly improved products or processes for commercialization in global markets.
About CliniWorks, Inc. – CliniWorks, Inc. is a global healthcare technology leader dedicated to the transformation of big data into actionable evidence-based decisions. CliniWorks is based in Cambridge, Massachusetts with an R&D center in Israel. Its core technology has been vetted in the healthcare industry for years and its leadership team has deep expertise in clinical data management. The company is dedicated to the simple, fast, and effective use of real-world evidence to accelerate clinical research, outcomes research, and improve healthcare performance, quality of care, patient-safety, compliance and adherence to meaningful use. This technology platform has been deployed and maintained within multiple large healthcare systems nationwide and across the globe. For more information, please visit www.cliniworks.com.
About Health Sciences South Carolina – Health Sciences South Carolina (HSSC) was established in 2004 as the nation’s first statewide biomedical research collaborative. Today its supported organizations include seven of the state’s largest health systems, including AnMed Health, Greenville Health System, McLeod Health, Medical University of South Carolina Hospital Authority, Palmetto Health, Self Regional Healthcare, and Spartanburg Regional Healthcare System, as well as the state’s largest research-intensive universities, including Clemson University, the Medical University of South Carolina, and the University of South Carolina. The collaboration was formed with the vision of transforming the state’s public health and economic wellbeing through research. To learn more about HSSC and its mission, please visit www.healthsciencessc.org/.
