San Diego Java User's Group

Speaker: Steven Elliott

Title: Semantic Web, Computable Documents and Healthcare IT

Abstract: In this presentation to SDJUG Steven will discuss the range of technologies and platforms that we're using to build tools and solutions in the complex modern healthcare marketplace. He will present different strategies to gather facts and clinical information from medical records and public health sources so they can be transformed into computable documents and resources. How different classifiers and reasoning engines can be used to provide additional knowledge representation from these sources. Finally how this knowledge is used in a rule based system to output actionable items. He will show how these systems are applied by demonstrating the Perinatal Quality Collaborative of North Carolina (PQCNC) application.

Company Bio: Cognitive was founded to change the healthcare system in the US through innovative software solutions, platforms and tools. We’re three years old, based in San Diego, have twenty employees, are bootstrapped, are cash flow positive and we’re profitable. Our customers today are the Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Health and Human Services and two commercial customers.

Cognitive specializes in an area called clinical decision support (CDS). The field of clinical decision support encompasses both technologies and evidence-based actionable content that enable doctors, nurses and patients make better decisions at the point of care. CDS provides support that is contextually relevant to the care setting and the patient’s entire healthcare record. Cognitive’s competitive advantages are in providing “real-time” context-aware clinical decision support that helps to simplify the complex clinical workflows that define modern healthcare.

Our first product is a mobile clinical quality data capture and analysis tool in use today in the Perinatal Quality Collaborative of North Carolina (PQCNC). PQCNC is a quality improvement consortium, started in North Carolina, of 160 neonatal ICUs across the US. This product allows doctors and nurses to capture clinical quality data at the point of care quickly and efficiently using an Android or Apple mobile device. The data is then sent to Cognitive’s clinical decision support platform in the Amazon Cloud that analyzes the data in real-time and provides actionable advice to the clinical care staff at the bedside. Further, this product and platform allow for reporting and analysis of the data which can then be added to the electronic healthcare record, be analyzed for population health, and be used to track quality improvement metrics and initiatives. This platform saves the clinical care staff valuable time that they would normally spend hand entering and analyzing the quality data onto paper-based forms.

Our ultimate goal is to offer a range of products both commercial and open-source, including expert systems and data analytics tools that can interface with the major electronic healthcare record systems. The adoption of such products in future health technology platforms has the potential to substantially improve quality of care, enhance healthcare outcomes, and decrease healthcare costs. Cognitive is also involved in defining national standards in the area of CDS which could revolutionize the way medicine is delivered in the future.