Named after William Farr, a pioneer of the science of epidemiology, the Farr Institute’s Centre for Improvement in Population Health through E-records Research (CIPHER) group at Swansea University has deployed Clinithink’s CLiX technology as part of a novel “Appliance” solution to support the analysis of e-health record information linked to other routinely collected clinical data.

Aimed at accelerating the discovery and adoption of health informatics for population health, CIPHER - working with a number of academic and industry partners - has constructed a Research Data Appliance which can be easily and rapidly deployed within the National Health Service (NHS) and academic organisations.

Once deployed, the Appliance will enable collaborators to link and explore large clinical datasets quickly and efficiently to gather valuable insight into vulnerable or high risk patient groups and more effectively manage the health of these patient populations.

David Ford, Professor of Health Informatics at Swansea University and Deputy Director of the Farr Institute: CIPHER said: “Our collaboration with industry partners is an important aspect of our work and we are very pleased to be partnering with Clinithink, in association with HPC Wales and Fujitsu.

“Clinithink’s innovative CLiX technology is vital for access to unstructured clinical data within the health data appliance we are delivering to research and NHS colleagues in Wales and the UK. Unstructured clinical narrative is as important in the meaningful analysis of healthcare big data as more established structured data sources.

“CLiX gives us the ability to interrogate the unstructured data and combine it with structured data to enable our collaborators to identify high risk groups and proactively manage them with improved outcomes and reduced costs.”

“We are delighted to be working with the world class Farr Institute’s CIPHER group, one of the UK’s designated Centres of Excellence for health informatics,” stated Dr. Chris Tackaberry, Clinithink CEO.

“We share Professor Ford’s view that unstructured clinical narrative is a crucial piece in the jigsaw of big data in healthcare. We are looking forward to supporting CIPHER as they roll out their health data appliance incorporating our CLiX technology. As a result, they are enabling their collaborators to discover new insights into population health management.”

The Centre for Improvement in Population Health through E-records Research (CIPHER) is a multinational research partnership based at the College of Medicine at Swansea University, UK, is focused on improving the health and wellbeing of the population through the use of health informatics research. It is one of the four UK Medical Research Council (MRC) funded Centres of excellence comprising the Farr Institute of Health Informatics Research.

The Farr Institute, CIPHER brings together some 50 investigators from ten universities across the UK (Swansea, Cardiff, Bristol, Brighton, Exeter, Oxford and Sussex), Australia (Curtin, Monash, Western Australia) and Canada (Ottawa), as well as from Finland’s National Institute for Health and Welfare. Strong collaborations have also been established with informaticians across the National Health Service and with industry (e.g. IBM, Microsoft, Open Connections, Quintiles, Risual, Clinithink, GPC Solutions, HPC Wales).

Farr Institute, CIPHER’s research aims to reduce delays between knowledge discovery, intervention assessment and adoption, and population impact.

About Clinithink

With operations in the US and UK, Clinithink is the healthcare industry’s preferred clinical natural language processing (CNLP) provider. Clinithink’s CLiX Platform enables healthcare providers and solution vendors to extract knowledge from the clinical data trapped in the free text of discharge summaries, clinical notes, and other clinical documents. Using patent-pending algorithms and CNLP to add structure to unstructured clinical data, CLiX enables the indexing, mapping and analyzing of clinical narrative to output rich structured data encoded to medical ontologies such as SNOMED CT, ICD-9, ICD-10 and RxNorm. For more information, visit www.clinithink.com or email us at sales@clinithink.com.