The Company Transforms Previously Inaccessible Patient Encounter Information into Research-Ready Insights to Bolster the Breadth of Real-World Data Available
OMNY Health, the leading healthcare ecosystem for compliant real-world data insights at scale, today announced it has added 4 billion unstructured clinical notes to its network. By collaborating with provider organizations, including academic medical centers and integrated delivery networks, OMNY Health is turning these previously inaccessible data points into research-ready insights to address the longstanding challenge of unlocking the value of clinician notes for research.
Approximately 80 percent of all healthcare data is unstructured, with a large portion residing in clinical notes. Historically, this valuable information has been difficult to access due to challenges with hospital information systems. The de-identification of notes and the linking of patient journeys across providers add another layer of complexity. By linking unstructured notes to EHR data, OMNY Health enhances the depth of real-world data available to its partners, including life sciences, AI, med tech, and other healthcare companies. This new offering will drive healthcare innovations, such as faster patient recruitment for clinical trials and training large language models for earlier disease detection.
Unstructured clinical notes contain valuable information such as:
- Symptoms & Disease Progression: Early-stage symptoms and disease progression often documented before formal diagnosis or coding.
- Treatment Patterns: Insights on treatment changes, patient adherence, and reasons for discontinuation.
- Treatment Rationale, Response & Adverse Events: Reasons for treatment choices, patient responses, and reported side effects or adverse events.
Unlocking data from clinical notes is also essential for advancing health equity initiatives in healthcare. By offering researchers more information on social determinants of health that affect underrepresented populations, data from these notes can help highlight gaps in care for marginalized communities. Additionally, they allow for a deeper examination of how disease presentation differs among various demographics.
“For years, critical patient insights have been locked away in free-text clinical notes, inaccessible to researchers and healthcare innovators. Our network’s expansion changes that by making this data available on a large scale,” said Dr. Mitesh Rao, CEO and Founder of OMNY Health. “High-quality data will continue to be essential for improving healthcare outcomes; it’s important to continue enhancing and refining the information we have available to help make better decisions and deliver more personalized care.”
OMNY Health recently completed a study on Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD) treatment patterns that highlights the benefits of combining EHR data with unstructured clinical notes. Leveraging large language models (LLMs), the company analyzed more than 10.6 million notes from its health system partners to understand why IBD patients switch or stop using treatments. This approach provided a comprehensive, real-world perspective on treatment decisions and identified seven reasons for treatment changes–key insights that would have been otherwise tucked away in encounter notes.
In addition to external research, unstructured data is valuable to the company’s health system partners, who want to improve patient care decisions internally. By incorporating these previously untapped insights, healthcare organizations can enhance clinical decision-making at the point of care.
“Unstructured data, like that found in free-text clinical notes, represents a treasure-trove of untapped insights,” said Mark Townsend, MD, MHCM, Chief Clinical Digital Ventures Officer, Bon Secours Mercy Health and Accrete Health Partners. “By leveraging unstructured data, we can improve patient outcomes, drive operational efficiencies, and foster innovation in healthcare. We are excited about using this rich, contextual information to move beyond surface-level analytics and to empower us to better understand patient journeys, to personalize care, and to improve decision-making at scale.”
This news follows OMNY Health’s strategic partnership with Scipher Medicine earlier this year, focusing on precision medicine efforts to treat rheumatoid arthritis. As OMNY Health expands and refines its data network, incorporating additional partnerships and patient data points will significantly enhance its ability to deliver personalized, data-driven insights. For more information, please visit omnyhealth.com.