As part of our Hot New Companies series we’re taking a closer look at Wired Informatics, a spinoff of the Boston Children’s Hospital (a teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School).
Wired Informatics was founded to provide next-generation Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) solutions to efficiently extract knowledge embedded in unstructured data across the healthcare ecosystem.
According to Murali Nagendranath, Co-Founder & Strategy Officer, about 80% of healthcare data is unstructured and not leveraged because of the complexity involved in processing it. However, long term care management, longitudinal health monitoring and precision medicine along with enrichment of patient experience and patient management can only be accomplished by successfully mining and understanding the knowledge contained in this unstructured text. This is the opportunity the company is addressing.
“About 80% of healthcare data is unstructured and not leveraged because of the complexity involved in processing it. Intelligently anlysing this represents a multi-billion dollar opportunity” – Murali Nagendranath, Co-Founder & Strategy Officer
The company’s flagship product, Invenio™ is a software system based on Machine Learning that can ingest millions of clinical narratives and systematically extract knowledge attributes by processing it through the various stages of Natural Language Processing. The software is designed to help healthcare and pharma companies easily solve clinical narrative challenges by fine-grain patient data mining.
Unstructured clinical narratives are turned into structured data containing terms that represent key elements of knowledge. The extracted terms are further normalized to controlled vocabularies thereby reducing the corpus of unusable data into “industry standard gold standard minable data.”
Business problems in large healthcare organizations such as predictive analytics, cohort identifications, clinical chart reviews and documentation fraud solutions are solved by leveraging Invenio™ as part of the enterprise work flow.
Murali says the company’s potential and addressable market includes all participants across the healthcare ecosystem ranging from Providers, Payers, Auditors, Analytic solutions, eLearning, mHealth and Pharma companies, and “conservatively estimates the size of the market to be in the range of $3-5 billion.”
The company believes that its potential customers are severely challenged by their ability to manage and leverage unstructured clinical data and comprehensively govern the exchange of this information both within the organization and outside the organization. Undertaking an in-house development is not feasible, as it requires inter disciplinary skills and years of research and large data sets.
Invenio™ is offered as a subscription license to organizations for an on premise development and production engagement. The company is currently operating within the US because of the maturity of the EMR implementations and the vast amount of clinical notes. In the near future the company plans to expand their offering to other English speaking countries such as the UK and Canada.
The founding team comprises of researcher, entrepreneurs and software engineers with strong technical and product development backgrounds. The core development team has over 15 years of expertise in Linguistics, Clinical NLP and enterprise software.
Wired Informatics is addressing a very large opportunity, both financially and in terms of improving lives, so we’re look forward to watching how they progress. You can find out more about the company from the diagram below or from the company’s website.