MetiStream Incorporated, a leader in transforming unstructured health data into usable clinical insights, is expanding its relationship with Carilion Clinic, a Roanoke, VA-headquartered healthcare system, to identify high-risk colon cancer patients using MetiStream's Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled Ember Platform. Ember analyzes and transforms clinical notes and text at scale to more accurately pinpoint patients who should be screened based on various risk factors found in their medical records.
Carilion will use MetiStream's solution to process over five years of patient information, specifically focusing on transforming unstructured clinical notes into a usable form to identify and correlate specific risk factors not found in discrete fields of the electronic medical record (EMR). Key attributes such as existing conditions, symptoms, family history, genetic markers, and social determinants of health will be used to identify which patients face the highest risk.
The objective is to proactively target patients who should be screened to significantly impact cancer prevention and improve outcomes.
"For many healthcare organizations, manually reviewing patient charts to identify those at risk is very costly and almost impossible given the volume of data and the ongoing changes in a patient's medical history," said Chiny Driscoll, CEO of MetiStream.
Cancer screening is a critical and effective approach for reducing risk and improving outcomes. "We have shown through our work with MetiStream that utilizing their technology can augment our clinicians' ability to have data at the point of care to improve our capability to stratify and treat patients," said Carilion Chief Medical Information Officer Dr. Steve Morgan.
Carilion Chief of Gastroenterology Dr. Paul Yeaton said, "In this particular project, we're able to identify high-risk patients for colon cancer and ensure they are getting the appropriate and timely screening tests."
Carilion and MetiStream began their partnership in mid-2021 to support patient and population-centric use cases and improve overall care. They initially focused on analyzing care quality and physician performance using AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The cancer risk program will increase Carilion's ability to proactively monitor and conduct outreach to patients where they live to improve cancer prevention.