Pittsburgh-based UPMC launched a new artificial intelligence-powered company that aims to help clinicians identify patients with chronic diseases and link them to treatment options.
Realyze Intelligence, incubated at and funded by UPMC Enterprises, provides a clinical intelligence platform that “reads” the detailed clinical notes in patients’ EMRs, said Aaron Brauser, president and CEO of the new company, in an email. Brauser is also co-founder of the Pittsburgh-based company along with Dr. Gilan El Saadawi, who serves as CMO of Realyze.
The platform leverages clinical models along with artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies to gather information from across the entire patient chart, including the descriptive clinical notes, he explained.
These notes provide a host of invaluable information about a patient over and above the structured data found within EMRs and data warehouses. But to access this information and understand the progression of a patient’s condition, these notes must be read and interpreted by a trained clinician, he said.
“This rich patient story is effectively trapped, resulting in billions of dollars wasted in abstraction costs,” Brauser said.
Realyze Intelligence’s solution is able to analyze the clinical notes along with the structured patient data in the EMR and categorize patients into specific disease populations. The platform can then help clinicians pair patients with the treatment that is likely to benefit them most.
“Realyze’s ability to assess massive amounts of unstructured data has added new dimension and depth to the analyses we do, making them even more useful for our clinicians as they deliver life-changing medicine to the communities we serve,” said Dr. Oscar C. Marroquin, UPMC’s chief health care data and analytics officer, in a news release.
For example, the Realyze platform can identify patients that have been diagnosed with stage 3b chronic kidney disease and not yet on dialysis, Brauser said.
“These patients can then be prioritized for referral to a specialist to provide better treatment and reduce the risk of having a ‘crash’ dialysis event,” he said.
Similarly, the platform can identify a cancer patient that matches the criteria for a new treatment and notify the clinician before treatment options are presented to the patient.
Looking ahead, Realyze Intelligence aims to expand its customer base across health systems and health plans nationwide and continue to develop packaged offerings to tackle chronic conditions and cancer, Brauser said.
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