Improving Patient Insights, Care through AI Data Analytics

The Challenge In the healthcare industry, social determinants of health — including economic stability, education, healthcare system and physical environment — are considered to be important factors in addressing patients’ holistic healthcare needs and outcomes.

A large healthcare provider was looking for a resource with expertise in natural language processing (NLP) that could mine physician notes to identify these important determinants. The goal was to create a cohesive, holistic patient health history — and better serve patient needs with regular, targeted and localized care — by establishing interoperability across thousands of healthcare provider electronic medical records (EMR) systems. The provider wanted to capture all caregiver notes to analyze social determinants of health in a structured format, and then ascertain whether these factors had a significant impact on patients’ health outcomes.

The Solution

We developed an AI and ML solution that identifies and analyzes which social determinants of health have a significant impact on a patient’s health by mining the unstructured data found in physicians’ notes. By supporting patients with proper care in their local communities, the system helps the provider more closely monitor and control patients’ overall health and illnesses. This has resulted in fewer acute medical issues requiring emergency room visits, which has lowered healthcare costs overall.

Our Approach

We built a text mining engine that efficiently analyzes physician notes to not just extract specific words and relevant information but also find meaningful insights and context. We implemented an algorithm to analyze 900,000 records from approximately 200,000 patients. The anonymized records comprise caregiver notes taken during patient encounters. This includes multiple notes from the same visit, such as operative, clinical, post-operative and discharge notes. Our solution helps identify people in need of care for a particular disease and points them to specific outreach programs in their local area.