Partnership Hopes to Improve Healthcare through Technology
June 5, 2017
A healthcare research organization and a data warehousing and analytics firm are teaming up to improve patient care, Healthcare IT News reports in, “Health Catalyst, Regenstrief Partner to Commercialize Natural Language Processing Technology.” The technology at hand is the nDepth (NLP Data Extraction Providing Targeted Healthcare) platform, Regenstrief’s specialized data analysis tool. Reporter Bernie Monegain elaborates:
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.
In addition, clinicians are contributing their knowledge to build and curate clinical domain expertise and phenotype libraries to augment the platform. Another worthy contributor is Memorial Hospital at Gulfport, which was a co-development partner and was the first to implement the Health Catalyst/ nDepth system.
Based in Indianapolis, the Regenstrief Institute was founded in 1969 with a mission—to facilitate the use of technology to improve patient care. Launched in 2008, Health Catalyst is much younger but holds a similar purpose—to improve healthcare with data analysis and information sharing technologies. That enterprise is based in Salt Lake City.
Cynthia Murrell, June 5, 2017
Linguistic Analytics Translate Doctor Scribbles
May 31, 2017
Healthcare is one of the industries that people imagine can be revolutionized by new technology. Digital electronic medical records, faster, more accurate diagnostic tools, and doctors having the ability to digest piles of data in minutes are some of the newest and best advances in medicine. Despite all of these wonderful improvements, healthcare still lags behind other fields transforming their big data into actionable, usable data. Inside Big Data shares the article, “How NLP Can Help Healthcare ‘Catchup’” discusses how natural language processing can help the healthcare industry make more effective use of their resources.
The reason healthcare lags behind other fields is that most of their data is unstructured:
This large realm of unstructured data includes qualitative information that contributes indispensable context in many different reports in the EHR, such as outside lab results, radiology images, pathology reports, patient feedback and other clinical reports. When combined with claims data this mix of data provides the raw material for healthcare payers and health systems to perform analytics. Outside the clinical setting, patient-reported outcomes can be hugely valuable, especially for life science companies seeking to understand the long-term efficacy and safety of therapeutic products across a wide population.
Natural language processing relies on linguistic algorithms to identify key meanings in unstructured data. When meaning is given to unstructured data, then it can be inserted into machine learning algorithms. Bitext’s computational linguistics platform does the same with its sentimental analysis algorithm. Healthcare information is never black and white like data in other industries. While the unstructured data is different from patient to patient, there are similarities and NLP helps the machine learning tools learn how to quantify what was once-unquantifiable.
Whitney Grace, May 31, 2017
Does This Count As Irony?
May 16, 2017
Does this count as irony?
Palantir, who has built its data-analysis business largely on its relationships with government organizations, has a Department of Labor analysis to thank for recent charges of discrimination. No word on whether that Department used Palantir software to “sift through” the reports. Now, Business Insider tells us, “Palantir Will Shell Out $1.7 Million to Settle Claims that It Discriminated Against Asian Engineers.” Writer Julie Bort tells us that, in addition to that payout, Palantir will make job offers to eight unspecified Asians. She also explains:
The issue arose because, as a government contractor, Palantir must report its diversity statistics to the government. The Labor Department sifted through these reports and concluded that even though Palantir received a huge number of qualified Asian applicants for certain roles, it was hiring only small numbers of them. Palantir, being the big data company that it is, did its own sifting and produced a data-filled response that it said refuted the allegations and showed that in some tech titles 25%-38% of its employees were Asians. Apparently, Palantirs protestations weren’t enough on to satisfy government regulators, so the company agreed to settle.
For its part, Palantir insists on their innocence but say they settled in order to put the matter behind them. Bort notes the unusual nature of this case—according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, African-Americans, Latin-Americans, and women are more underrepresented in tech fields than Asians. Is the Department of Labor making it a rule to analyze the hiring patterns of companies required to report diversity statistics? If they are consistent, there should soon be a number of such lawsuits regarding discrimination against other groups. We shall see.
Cynthia Murrell, May 16, 2017
Medical Records Are the Hot New Dark Web Commodity
January 10, 2017
From emails to Netflix and Uber account information to other personally identifiable information has long been for sale on the Dark Web. A recent article from Fast Company, On The Dark Web, Medical Records Are A Hot Commodity, shares that medical records are the latest offerings for sale on the Dark Web. Medical records sold in these marketplaces usually include an individual’s name, birthdate, social security number and medical information. They fetch the relatively high price of $60 a piece, in comparison to social security numbers at $15. The article explains more,
On the dark web, medical records draw a far higher price than credit cards. Hackers are well aware that it’s simple enough to cancel a credit card, but to change a social security number is no easy feat. Banks have taken some major steps to crack down on identity theft. But hospitals, which have only transitioned en masse from paper-based to digital systems in the past decade, have far fewer security protections in place.
Cybercrime of medical records is potentially life-threatening because oftentimes during the theft of medical records, data showing allergies and other vital information is erased or swapped. Hopefully, the amount of time it took the medical industry to transition from paper to electronic health records is not representative of the time it will take the industry to increase security measures.
Megan Feil, January 10, 2017
Healthcare Technology as a Target for Cyberthreats
December 20, 2016
Will the healthcare industry become the target of cyber threats? Security Affairs released a story, Data breaches in the healthcare sector are fueling the dark web, which explains medical records are among the most challenging data sources to secure. One hacker reportedly announced on the Dark Web he had over one million medical records for sale. The going rate is about $60 per record. According to the Brookings Institute, more than 155 medical records have been hacked since 2009. We learned,
The healthcare sector is a labyrinth of governance and compliance with risk mitigations squarely focused on the privacy of patient data. We in the industry have accepted the norm that “security is not convenient” but for those in the healthcare industry, inconvenience can have a catastrophic impact on a hospital, including the loss of a patient’s life. Besides patient records, there’s a multitude of other services critical to patient health and wellbeing wrapped by an intricate web of cutting-edge and legacy technologies making it perhaps the most challenging environment to secure. This may explain the rise in attacks against healthcare providers in the last six months.
When it comes to prioritizing secure healthcare technology projects in healthcare organizations, many other more immediate and short-term projects are likely to take precedence. Besides that barrier, a shortage of healthcare technology talent poses another potential problem.
Megan Feil, December 20, 2016
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