Boston, MA, Oct. 23, 2013 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Researchers from Boston Children's Hospital announced today the launch of Wired Informatics, providers of next generation, enterprise-grade natural language processing solutions to hospitals and other healthcare industry environments.
Established to meet the growing need for innovative data solutions for electronic medical and healthcare records, Wired Informatics addresses the problem of extracting information and structuring data that has overwhelmed providers of all sizes, from physician networks and universities to insurance and medical transcription services.
"There has been a tremendous increase in demand for relevant enterprise-ready natural language processing solutions specifically tailored for the clinical domain," said Dr. Guergana Savova, Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School, Principal Investigator of the Natural Language Processing Lab at Boston Children's Hospital, and a founding advisory member of Wired Informatics, LLC.
"It's exciting to see how basic research in computational linguistics has been applied to electronic health records (EHRs). Machine understanding of the narrative texts that we, as clinicians, use to communicate with one another in the EHR is proving to be essential for a much more precise and clinically relevant understanding of our patients. This is true both for biomedical research and for clinical care," said Director of Boston Children's Hospital's Informatics Program Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD.
Introducing InvenioTM
The company's flagship product, InvenioTM, is an enterprise natural language processing solution that provides leading health care providers and researchers with an innovative solution to extract and leverage knowledge contained in clinical notes, among other applications.
Invenio significantly helps researchers, hospitals and medical record processors address the myriad challenges of personalized medicine and clinical investigation. Challenges commonly faced by hospitals and care providers across the healthcare ecosystem include:
- Structuring Data -converting unusable/unstable data (e.g., plain-text clinical and patient notes)
- Analytics/Searching/Discovery/Segmentation -fine-grain data mining of patient profiles and applications of advanced multivariate analytics to combine biomarker information with clinical data
- Annotations/Semantics -unifying diverse datasets; creating rich linguistic/semantic annotations that can be utilized by clinical decision support systems and research
- Standardization/Interoperability -transforming data formats across EHR's to standard XML output and ontology codes
- Big Data/Scalability -easily deploying on local standard commodity hardware, dedicated clusters, and/or Cloud computing frameworks
Invenio-normalized output is the foundation for implementing several use cases for researchers and practitioners in the clinical domain. Key application areas include automated phenotyping, cohort identification, comparative effectiveness, meaningful use, quality measurements, clinical practice, epidemiology, and more.
At the core of Invenio are several key Apache Open Source software products that extract, structure, and normalize knowledge embedded in the clinical narrative within electronic health records. They include: Apache cTAKES (clinical Text Analysis and Knowledge Extraction System), Apache UIMA (Unstructured Information Management Architecture), Apache Lucene/Solr information retrieval platform and the Apache OpenNLP natural language processing toolkit.
"We are proud to be a bridge between the open source community and commercial users where we are committed to contributing back to the community and furthering the science of clinical natural language processing," said Pei Chen, a lead technologist at the Natural Language Processing Lab at Boston Children's Hospital and Vice President of Apache cTAKES.
Invenio is also easily customizable, allowing hospitals, medical researchers, universities, integrated health providers, pharmaceutical companies, and others across the healthcare ecosystem to be fully integrated in just a few weeks.
"We are pleased to partner with Wired Informatics to make these technologies available to a much broader community and offer state-of-the-art clinical natural language processing methods as a robust scalable commodity," added Dr. Savova.
Wired Informatics solutions are currently running at several medical institutions in New England. The company plans to continue to leverage its extensive intellectual property to deploy the Invenio platform across a variety of healthcare and related enterprise environments.
About Boston Children's Hospital
Boston Children's Hospital is home to the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, where its discoveries have benefited both children and adults since 1869. More than 1,100 scientists, including nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 members of the Institute of Medicine and 11 members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute comprise Boston Children's research community. Founded as a 20-bed hospital for children, Boston Children's today is a 395-bed comprehensive center for pediatric and adolescent health care grounded in the values of excellence in patient care and sensitivity to the complex needs and diversity of children and families. Boston Children's also is a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School. For more information about research and clinical innovation at Boston Children's, visit http://vectorblog.org/.
About Wired Informatics, LLC
A spinoff of the Boston Children's Hospital, Wired Informatics was founded in 2012 to provide next-generation natural language processing and machine-learning solutions that can efficiently extract knowledge embedded in unstructured data across the healthcare ecosystem. The company's flagship product, InvenioTM, successfully helps researchers, hospitals, and medical record processors easily solve clinical narrative challenges by dovetailing fine-grain patient profile data mining with advanced analytics applications that combine biomarker information with clinical data. For more information visit: http://www.wiredinformatics.com
"Invenio" is a trademark of Wired Informatics, LLC. "Apache", "Apache cTAKES", "cTAKES", "Apache Lucene/Solr", "Lucene", "Solr", "OpenNLP", "Apache OpenNLP", "Apache UIMA", and "UIMA" are trademarks of The Apache Software Foundation. All other brands and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
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