Regenstrief Institute & Health Catalyst Team to Reveal Hidden Meaning in Clinical Data for Better Patient Care

Partnership commercializes validated research & world-renowned expertise to extract clinical insights from text records   

ORLANDO,FL – February  21, 2017 — From the floor of the HIMSS17 Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Health Catalyst and the Regenstrief Institute announced today an agreement to bring Regenstrief’s artificial intelligence-powered text analytics technology out of the lab and into healthcare organizations nationwide.

Regenstrief’s nDepth™ technology, internally developed within the largest and longest running health information exchange in the country, has been fine-tuned through extensive and repeated use searching over 230 million text records from more than 17 million patients and promises to accelerate improvements in patient health by unlocking the vast troves of unstructured data hidden within electronic health records (EHRs).  As a key commercialization partner, Health Catalyst will incorporate the nDepth^TM solution into the Health Catalyst data analytics platform used by health systems serving 85 million patients across the U.S.

“Eighty percent of clinical data is locked away in unstructured physician notes that can’t be read by an EHR and so can’t be accessed by advanced decision support and quality improvement applications,” said Peter J. Embi, MD, MS, President and CEO of Regenstrief Institute. “By combining Health Catalyst’s analytics market leadership and data platform with our text analytics and expertise, we will help millions of patients benefit from the untapped potential hidden within unstructured data.”

First Deployment Site

Memorial Hospital at Gulfport, in Gulfport, Miss., ranked the best hospital in Mississippi by US News & World Report, served as the co-development partner and first deployment site for Health Catalyst’s integration of nDepth. The award-winning 445-bed not-for-profit health system, which has earned a reputation as a bastion of quality care, deployed the Health Catalyst data and analytics platform in 2014.

“I believe it is important for community health systems like Memorial that have made significant investments in electronic health records to take the next step in care by unlocking the value in the EHR’s unstructured data,” said Gene Thomas, Chief Information Officer of Memorial Hospital at Gulfport. “Our partnership with Health Catalyst and their incorporation of nDepth is enabling that value to impact the front lines of care for the first time.”

nDepth analyzes any document type and unlocks the value of unstructured data to deliver meaningful insights directly to clinicians and quality improvement professionals. The solution uses Natural Language Processing (NLP)—a combination of linguistics, pattern recognition, and machine learning—to derive meaning from text. nDepth enhances these foundational technologies with clinical domain expertise and rich phenotype libraries built and curated by clinicians.

Some recent applications of nDepth include:

• Finding patients with metastatic melanoma
• Identifying pre-diabetic patients for clinical trials
• Capturing hypoglycemic events
• Identifying patients with family history of lung cancers
• Mapping patient trajectory following cancer treatment
• Detecting treatment failure in insomnia
• Finding reasons for refusal of osteoporosis medications
• Identifying “triple negative” breast cancers

“The Regenstrief Institute has been setting the bar for high quality medical informatics research and innovation for decades – (former director) Clem McDonald is one of my heroes,” said Dale Sanders, Executive Vice President of Development for Health Catalyst. “Our approach to NLP and text analytics are different than the norm in healthcare, so we were originally committed to developing our own product, but when we saw what Regenstrief had built, which aligned with our approach, we were thrilled to change course in favor of combining our rich data content with nDepth. Text and NLP technology in healthcare has been stuck in the realm of tinkering and not had an impact on the front lines of care. We firmly believe this partnership is going to make a breakthrough contribution across the board, at the front lines of healthcare—in clinical research, quality of care, precision medicine, and cost reduction.”

Sanders added, “Memorial Hospital Gulfport is most definitely at the front lines of care and we are enormously grateful to Gene Thomas and his willingness to serve as our development partner.”

The Health Catalyst data analytics platform provides the foundation for improving value-based population health outcomes. The company’s foundational enterprise data warehouse (EDW) integrates over 140 different data sources, including the electronic health record (EHR), claims, key financial, operational and patient satisfaction systems. Powered by that data, Health Catalyst’s Best In KLAS® suite of analytics applications leverages machine learning to drive predictions such as identifying patients who are most likely to acquire deadly infections; finding those who may have trouble paying their medical bills; or launching proactive medical interventions for patients who are at risk for dangerous complications.

Visit Health Catalyst at HIMSS17 in Orlando
Health Catalyst will demonstrate its solutions at the 2017 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition in Orlando, Feb. 20-23.  Visit booth #5173 or schedule a meeting to ensure the right people are available to meet with you.

About Regenstrief Institute
Regenstrief Institute is a dynamic, people-centered research organization driven by a mission to create pathways for better health. We envision a world where every patient has access to the highest quality, most efficient healthcare available, at an affordable cost. Our talented and dedicated staff support an award-winning body of faculty investigators from both Indiana University and Purdue University. Within and across the Institute we seek to find ways to integrate research discovery, technological advances, and systems improvement into the practice of medicine. See how we’ve worked to improve patient care by visiting www.regenstrief.org and following us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

About Health Catalyst
Health Catalyst is a next-generation data, analytics, and decision support company committed to being a catalyst for massive, sustained improvements in healthcare outcomes. We are the leaders in a new era of advanced predictive analytics for population health and value-based care with a suite of machine learning-driven solutions, decades of outcomes-improvement expertise, and an unparalleled ability to integrate data from across the healthcare ecosystem. Our proven data warehousing and analytics platform helps improve quality, add efficiency and lower costs in support of more than 85 million patients for organizations ranging from the largest US health system to forward-thinking physician practices. Our technology and professional services can help you keep patients engaged and healthy in their homes and workplaces, and we can help you optimize care delivery to those patients when it becomes necessary. We are grateful to be recognized by Fortune, Gallup, Glassdoor, Modern Healthcare and a host of others as a Best Place to Work in technology and healthcare. Visit www.healthcatalyst.com, and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. 

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