Wolters Kluwer, Health announced today it has expanded its portfolio of real-world artificial intelligence (AI) solutions with the addition of a clinical natural language processing (cNLP) solution that enables healthcare organizations to unlock the value of unstructured clinical information. The solution, part of the Health Language platform, supports extraction of patient data found in free-text physician notes and patients’ electronic health records to improve the quality of data across payer and provider organizations.
Unstructured data currently represent as much as 80% of documentation in patient records, creating notable challenges for healthcare organizations in their quest to fully access, search and analyze vast amounts of information from a growing number of disparate sources. Current estimates suggest that the amount of data the healthcare industry amasses doubles every three years, and by 2020, it is projected to double every 73 days. Found in a variety of forms captured throughout the care cycle, such as medical history, progress notes, imaging and laboratory narratives, critical information in free text form remains largely unused due to resource-intensive manual processes required to extract it.
The Health Language cNLP solution delivers the industry’s most comprehensive approach to identifying and using unstructured information and is easily integrated into health IT environments through application programming interfaces (APIs). Supporting extraction, conversion and mapping of free text to industry standards, the application ensures interoperability and meaningful exchange of data assets that have the power to provide deeper analytics insights.
“Over the last 10-plus years, we’ve worked with more than 300,000 clinicians across numerous EMR platforms capturing how they search and document problems and diagnoses at the point-of-care and we’ve combined that expertise with common words associated with labs and drugs—all of which is now completely integrated within cNLP,” said Karen Kobelski, Vice President and General Manager, Clinical Surveillance, Compliance & Data Solutions at Wolters Kluwer, Health.
Notably, the Health Language cNLP offering will enable payers, providers and health IT vendors to identify and extract over a million different ways problems, diagnoses, labs and drugs are represented within the medical record and resolve them to specific codes to power risk adjustment, analytics, quality measures and other data quality initiatives.
Health Language is part of Wolters Kluwer’s Clinical Surveillance, Compliance & Data Solutions business unit, combining unmatched industry expertise with advanced terminology tools and finely-tuned matching algorithms powered by machine learning. Wolters Kluwer clinical experts—each offering an average of more than 25 years of healthcare terminology experience—partner with healthcare organizations to optimize use of data assets for improving outcomes, containing costs and delivering better care.
