In healthcare, the information needed to provide high-quality care is difficult to access. In fact, more than 80% of the information about your medical care is written in hospital and physician office records; it is “unstructured” and generally tough to retrieve. This means, doctors often work with incomplete information about their patients when making decisions. Can you imagine only having 20% of the necessary information you need to make a potentially life-changing decision?
It can be tough to understand the magnitude of this problem, so here’s a cool way to help illustrate the issue at hand. Try guessing the following popular logos, with only a small portion of the logo visible:
Pretty tough, right? What if we were able to change the way healthcare is delivered and consumed, so we could extract and analyze that unused 80% of patient information? Care providers could have realtime access to our history of care and a much clearer understanding of who we are, which could have a direct impact on providing user-directed or personalized care. Such understanding would allow for earlier interventions, matching of procedures and physicians, and improved outcomes.
Apixio is leading the way with this work. Cognitive computing technologies such as Apixio’s Iris platform have the power to extract, read and learn from the untapped treasure-trove of healthcare data. We are on the brink of a new data revolution in healthcare that will improve patient care and quality outcomes.