{"id":961,"date":"2018-07-01T12:38:00","date_gmt":"2018-07-01T12:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/innovationisrael.org.il\/en\/?p=961"},"modified":"2023-11-21T07:50:02","modified_gmt":"2023-11-21T07:50:02","slug":"understanding-the-context-in-the-clinical-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/innovationisrael.org.il\/en\/understanding-the-context-in-the-clinical-text\/","title":{"rendered":"Understanding the Context in the Clinical Text"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
Analysis of ‘big-data’ and a patient’s clinical information to improve the quality of his medical treatment stands at the basis of the software program developed by the OpisoftCare Corporation. The company, that focuses on improving the capability of accurate real-time clinical decision making, was established in 2014 by three entrepreneurs: Gideon Israeli, Erez Peleg, and Amit May-Dan. “OpisoftCare’s development is a system for analyzing all the patient’s clinical data, both structured and unstructured, in real-time and for providing a warning regarding preventable dangerous clinical situations during his hospitalization, such as hospital-acquired infections or readmission and repeat surgery,” explains the CEO, Amit May-Dan. “This development has been made possible by a grant we received from the R&D fund of the Israel Innovation Authority.”
“A fighter pilot needs to process dozens, even hundreds, of pieces of information in real-time to decide his next move,” May-Dan illustrates. “T succeed, he makes use of sophisticated systems that analyze the situation and assist him in making the correct decision. A doctor is in a similar situtaton to a fighter pilot, when in the hospital. Doctors examine thousands of pieces of data and need to make the optimal decision for their patients. The vast scope of data makes it difficult for the medical team to decide correctly in real-time. A comprehensive computerization process began five years ago throughout all hospitals in the United States called ‘Unified Medical Record’ \u2013 a single system that gathers information from all systems about all patients but does not assist in decision making. That is where OpisoftCare comes in. Just as the pilot’s systems provide him with recommendations, so too OpisoftCare gathers data from all hospital systems in real-time, thereby enabling the clinician to make an informed decision about a particular patient and to warn of problems long before the medical team is aware of their existence.”
For example, OpisoftCare’s software can ‘read’ the clinical data and provide a warning, by crosschecking the structured and unstructured information in real-time, that one of the hospitalized patients is at risk of a particular infection. This data already exists, but is generally in textual form, because clinicians record visitation summaries and test results in writing. Naturally, this leads to a lack of uniformity \u2013 each hospital has a different database system which lacks other data components. Our technology, however, creates uniformity between all the hospitals and supplements the missing information. We are the only technology platform that enables the real-time creation of all necessary data for the different hospitals”, emphasizes May-Dan.
“In practice, one of the innovative components that we have developed, with the assistance of the grant from the Israel Innovation Authority, is an engine that understands the context within a clinical text. For example, when we search for pneumonia, in most cases the medical text does not even mention the word ‘lungs,’ but rather, will provide terms such as ‘Filtrate of the Upper Left Lobe.’ In other cases, the information will be irrelevant, such as evidence of a previous lung infection. It is important to understand that the concept is not only language-biased but also attuned to culture. In South Carolina for example, ‘fainting’ is termed ‘falling.’ Our system understands these nuances and knows to analyze the clinical significance of these medical descriptions in real-time”, he explains.<\/p>\n\n\n