Big Data in Practice

6 APIXIO How Big Data Is Transforming Healthcare

Background

California-based cognitive computing firm Apixio were founded in 2009 with the vision of uncovering and making accessible clinical knowledge from digitized medical records, in order to improve healthcare decision making. With their team of healthcare experts, data scientists, engineers and product experts, the company have now set their sights on enabling healthcare providers to learn from practice-based evidence to individually tailor care.

What Problem Is Big Data Helping To Solve?

A staggering 80% of medical and clinical information about patients is formed of unstructured data, such as written physician notes. As Apixio CEO Darren Schulte explains, “If we want to learn how to better care for individuals and understand more about the health of the population as a whole, we need to be able to mine unstructured data for insights.” Thus, the problem in healthcare is not lack of data, but the unstructured nature of its data: the many, many different formats and templates that healthcare providers use, and the numerous different systems that house this information. To tackle this problem, Apixio devised a way to access and make sense of that clinical information.

How Is Big Data Used In Practice?

Electronic health records (EHRs) have been around for a while, but they are not designed to facilitate data analysis and contain data stored across a number of different systems and formats. So before Apixio can even analyse ...