Posts from February 2018

Life sciences
Jane Reed

Tracking and reporting adverse events

In recent years, regulatory authorities such as the FDA and EMA have placed an increased emphasis on drug safety of marketed products, particularly the tracking and reporting of adverse events. Pharmaceutical companies are expected to regularly screen the worldwide scientific literature for potential adverse drug reactions, at least every two weeks. The use of text mining and other tools to streamline the literature review process for pharmacovigilance is more crucial than ever in order to ensure patient safety, without overloading drug safety teams.

Manual review of adverse events is time-consuming

Eric Lewis (Safety Development Leader at GlaxoSmithKline) talked at the Linguamatics Text Mining Summit about the challenges of reviewing medical literature for safety signals. For example, he looked for literature for a sample of just 20 marketed products across a 300-day period. Eric found that there were on average 60 new references per day (with a total of over 11,000 documents). He found that manual review time was 1.2 to 1.6 minutes per abstract. He extrapolated this to a typical pharma company product portfolio of 200 marketed products, and showed that this volume of literature would take over 2,200 hours to review – hugely time-consuming.

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Healthcare
Lauren Barham

The 2018 Annual HIMSS Conference & Exhibition takes place next month in Las Vegas, where the Sands Expo Convention Center will be filled with 40,000+ healthcare industry professionals, who have come together from around the world to discuss hot topics in health IT, industry issues and cutting-edge solutions.

For a fourth consecutive year, Linguamatics is proud to be exhibiting at HIMSS, an event that aims to help health IT professionals find innovative solutions to the challenges facing their organizations.

The five-day conference gives attendees the opportunity to educate themselves on ‘what’s new’ and ‘hot topics’ within the industry, and to participate in powerful networking sessions at breakfast networking events and the careers fair.

Linguamatics will showcase their world-leading NLP text mining software, I2E, which has social determinants of health, pathology and other healthcare modules set up to automatically “read” clinical documentation, and rapidly extract relevant elements into discrete values for analysis and effective decision support.

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Company news

I2E Natural Language Processing improves Medicare Advantage reimbursement, streamlines ACO reporting and reduces care gaps

Boston, USA – February 1, 2018 – Natural Language Processing (NLP) text analytics provider Linguamatics today announced the implementation of the Linguamatics Health enterprise NLP platform, powered by I2E, at Atrius Health to identify and extract critical clinical information hidden within unstructured patient data.

Atrius Health is a non-profit healthcare leader providing primary care and specialty care to more than 740,000 adult and pediatric patients across eastern and central Massachusetts. As a long-term Accountable Care Organization (ACO) for Medicare, commercial, and Medicaid patients, Atrius Health requires ready access to clinical notes and data to address reporting requirements and advance quality care initiatives, including programs that require the proper identification of at-risk patients to minimize care gaps.

“A vast amount of critical clinical data exists as unstructured text which is difficult to access and analyze. We are leveraging the power of NLP to replace the manual, inefficient data extraction processes that many healthcare organizations struggle with, in order to advance our quality care initiatives more rapidly,” said Joe Kimura, MD, Atrius Health’s chief medical officer. “Linguamatics NLP allows us to close gaps in care, enhance clinical documentation for chronic disorders, reduce litigation risks, and streamline Medicare ACO quality reporting.”

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