UPMC Forms Realyze Intelligence to Drive Patient Care with AI

PITTSBURGH – Leading health system UPMC has launched Realyze Intelligence, a company that uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing to identify precise patient populations with chronic diseases and cancer to ensure they receive the most beneficial treatments.

The Realyze clinical intelligence platform “reads” both the detailed clinical notes and structured data from patients’ electronic medical records (EMR). This deeper knowledge can be used by clinicians to identify precisely defined cohorts of patients who may be at higher risk of poor health outcomes, and those individuals can then be prioritized to receive appropriate care in a timely fashion.

“Patients aren't defined by their primary diagnosis. They are not just dealing with that one condition, but also many other factors that make them complex, and it currently is a manual, time-consuming effort to extract and use the relevant information from the EMR to ensure effective care,” said Gilan El Saadawi, M.D., Ph.D., Realyze chief medical officer. “Realyze streamlines this process and quickly decodes the patient’s ‘story’ so they get the best care.” 

Providers use Realyze’s web-based tools to quickly assess the data that already are present in patients’ notes. The dynamic platform can be deployed within a provider’s workflow, making the solution effective for a variety of patient conditions, including various cancers, chronic kidney disease (CKD), diabetes and inflammatory bowel disease. 

The U.S. health care industry spends $8.7 billion per year employing people primarily to read clinical notes to abstract data for various clinical workflows. 

“For providers to give the most effective care, they need a complete understanding of their patients and all of their comorbidities. Realyze helps them find specific patients and intervene at the correct time with the correct treatment,” said Aaron Brauser, Realyze president and chief executive officer. “This can improve a patient’s overall health while hospitals benefit from avoidance of unplanned events and reduction of abstraction costs.”

For example, in an analysis of more than 100,000 CKD patients at UPMC, Realyze enhanced the work done by UPMC’s clinical analytics team by deriving new insights from clinical notes that were not available in the structured data. With this information, UPMC will improve its ability to implement more precise patient segmentation, which, in turn, will allow clinicians to better deploy resources for more appropriate care.   

“As UPMC continues to pursue data-driven, high-quality health care, we always are looking for ways to get more information that can enhance the analytic-driven insights our clinicians need,” said Oscar C. Marroquin, M.D., UPMC’s chief health care data and analytics officer. “Realyze’s ability to assess massive amounts of unstructured data has added new dimension and depth to the analyses we do, making them even more useful for our clinicians as they deliver life-changing medicine to the communities we serve.” 

El Saadawi and Brauser founded Realyze in conjunction with UPMC Enterprises, the innovation and commercialization arm of UPMC. Visit the Realyze website for additional information. 

---

PHOTO INFO: (click images for high-res versions)