Healthcare providers are facing un-precedented levels of competing demand for precious clinical time and resource. Post-pandemic, the need to reduce the burden on hard-pressed front-line teams has never been greater. Yet, at the same time, demand is increasing, and the elective backlog represents a significant challenge. Similarly, population health management is becoming an ever more important focus in healthcare strategy - but this also requires front-line resource.
Taking advantage of innovative digital health solutions to help address these challenges is crucially important, and
no longer optional. In doing so, it will have a greater impact on health outcomes, whilst also reducing the burden on frontline teams.
Deliver unique clinical analytic insights to help transform the delivery of care
As the NHS Long Term Plan sets out, population health management is an essential component for driving better health outcomes through earlier intervention with more precisely defined vulnerable groups. Targeting interventions for these groups makes best use of scare clinical resource, reduces overall load on the system (and therefore reduces cost). The challenge, however, is finding those groups efficiently.
CLiX unlock solves this problem by rapidly reading and understanding the narrative content in the entire medical record. The detail locked away in the documents authored by clinical professionals during the delivery of care contains vital information that must be assessed to determine whether someone does, or does not, match the criteria that defines a particular vulnerable group who will benefit from pro-active intervention.
The technology can process millions of documents in hours instead of weeks of manual effort, saving staff valuable time, and helping to identify those who are most likely to benefit from the intervention so much more quickly than any manual approach.
CLiX unlock does this using Clinical Natural Language Processing (CNLP) technology, a highly specialised branch of AI that enables machines to understand human language. CNLP is able to understand billions of different word and phrase combinations that relate to hundreds of thousands of detailed clinical concepts.
CNLP technology also has the capability to process lengthy, detailed, chronologically ordered content within a patient’s records and compare it with equally detailed criteria that define an at-risk group. It is ideally suited to enabling pro-active intervention in chronic disease states which are not coded or captured in structured data. Finding these patients, until now, relies on exhaustive manual review of patient records to find the “needles in the haystack”. The reality is that this resource is already fully committed to care delivery, there is no capacity to find the vulnerable groups in question.
By delegating large-scale detailed record review to CLiX unlock, clinical time is released or saved (or both), while at the same time identifying very specific patient groups whose clinical course and outcome could be dramatically improved by early, targeted intervention.
Barts Health NHS Trust used Clinithink’s CLiX unlock to find patients at risk of amputation due to worsening diabetic foot disease. Using CLiX unlock, they found 350% more patients than could be found using structured data. Read here for more information.
“Attempting this scale of analysis manually would have been frankly impossible. Theoretically it would have taken one clinician over a hundred years to review that volume of documents. So not only does AI technology help us find patients who we couldn’t otherwise find, it also saves precious clinical time.”
Dr Charles Gutteridge, Chief Clinical Information Officer at Barts Health NHS Trust, London
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