Clinithink’s CLiX Engine processes unstructured clinical narrative data in documents, reports, web pages, transcribed output, EMR databases/applications and any other electronic source of free text created by physicians and other care providers in the healthcare context. Using innovative, patent-pending Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, CLiX analyzes the input narrative and delivers rich, structured content that corresponds with the meaning of the input text. By outputting the data in a structured form (as encoded SNOMED CT, ICD-9, ICD-10, RxNorm, XML and many other standard formats), the meaning that was “trapped” in the free text input document is unlocked, providing healthcare organizations with a valuable information asset that can be used to facilitate a wide range of important activities: clinical analytics, decision support, computer-assisted coding and revenue cycle optimization, and performance and outcome monitoring, including the Meaningful Use quality measures (U.S.), clinical trial candidate identification and epidemiology.

SNOMED Clinical Terms (SNOMED CT) is the most comprehensive, multilingual clinical healthcare terminology in the world. SNOMED CT contributes to the improvement of patient care by underpinning the development of Electronic Medical Records that record clinical information in ways that enable meaning-based retrieval. This provides effective access to information required for decision support and consistent reporting and analysis. Patients benefit from the use of SNOMED CT because it ehnahnces the recording of EMR information and facilitates better communication, leading to significant improvements in the quality of care. (source: http://www.ihtsdo.org/snomed-ct/)

CNLP is the acronym for Clinical Natural Language Processing, which takes traditional NLP, or Natural Language Processing, a significant step further into the field of healthcare. Clinithink is the pioneering company behind CNLP. The company's patent pending CLiX indexing engine is the only solution available that can unlock unstructured healthcare data to deliver a true understanding of clinical language and convert it into fully coded, actionable information for improved point-of-care decision-making.

Yes, you can test the accuracy of CLiX against a small sample of your own data by registering for our CLiX online service at https://trial.clinithink.com. This browser application allows you to enter text manually or copy and paste the text content from existing files you want CLiX to process. Once the data is processed, the browser provides facilities to view the output produced by CLiX, including a view of SNOMED CT expressions.

What makes one solution better than another is often dependent on what it’s going to be used for. However, here are some reasons why CLiX may be the right solution for you:

• CLiX was designed specifically to meet the needs of the healthcare sector;
• CLiX was designed, developed and implemented by an experienced team of healthcare specialists;
• CLiX is 100% owned by Clinithink, and we have total control over our product strategy, roadmap and direction;
• CLiX was designed to be used at the point-of-care in real time;
• CLiX is highly scalable and provides/delivers outstanding throughput on a very cost-effective infrastructure;
• CLiX is very accurate (test it for yourself at http://trial.clinithink.com)
• CLiX is easy to integrate and quick to deploy.

CLiX can process unstructured narrative clinical data sent to it from documents, reports, web pages, transcribed output, EMR databases/applications, and any other electronic source of free text created by physicians and other care providers in a healthcare context.

CLiX can process any format of electronic input document provided it is in English.  This can range from structured data, semi structured data to unstructured narrative.

The best place to start is to try CLiX with your own data.  To access CLiX just register for our CLiX Online service at: https://trial.clinithink.com. In addition to the services of CLiX itself, CLiX Online gives you access to a browser which allows you to test the behaviour of CLiX against your data.

CLiX is typically between 75 and 90% accurate depending on the source material and how much optimisation has taken place. There are many variables that affect performance such as:  the quality of the English used in the input documents, the speciality concerned, the coverage of SNOMED CT within that speciality, etc. The optimisation process fills in the gaps in coverage of both language and SNOMED CT concepts and improves the accuracy of the results.

You do need a SNOMED CT license to use CLiX and this can either be through an existing national license or by way of an organizational license.  If you do not have either, a license can be acquired from IHTSDO.

Both.  CLiX technology can either be accessed as an on-premise solution or as an online service that integrates within your existing systems and services.

Yes, take a look at our simple online demo of CLiX at: https://trial.clinithink.com. Or if you’d like to know more about how you can leverage the power of CLiX in your own environment, please reach out to our sales team at sales@clinithink.com, who would be delighted to discuss your requirements with you.

If you are not already covered by a national or organizational license to use SNOMED CT, a license can be acquired from IHTSDO.

By encoding the content of medical records in SNOMED CT, CLiX facilitates the understanding of the record by third party decision support systems and reduces the need for the physician to enter patient data directly into the decision support system.

Yes, you can.  Depending on your needs, you can either use CLiX through our online service or you can deploy CLiX locally within your organization.

CLiX is being implemented into a number of partner solutions and platforms in the U.S., U.K., SE Asia and Australia. The roll out of these solutions by our partners to their customers will deliver end-user deployments. In addition, CLiX is being implemented at Alameda County Medical Centre in the US, to support a number of business-critical activities.

Under Meaningful Use Stage 2, you must capture patient problem lists using either ICD-10 or SNOMED CT. While coding to either terminology is an unfamiliar and complex task for most clinicians, CLiX can automatically tag all problems referenced in a patient note with both ICD-10 and SNOMED. The automated capture of possible ICD-10 codes will also streamline your billing processes, while SNOMED encodings will facilitate analytics and clinical decision support not previously possible. CLiX can also support the capture of medications and allergies, saving physicians time associated with filling and maintaining these lists.

Absolutely. CLiX rapidly extracts structured information from free-text clinical narrative. This information can be used to identify potential coding matches that can then be passed to a CAC system in order to complete the coding process. CLiX uses the SNOMED CT terminology to represent complex clinical concepts, making it possible to accurately map to much more comprehensive ICD-10 codes.

No. CLiX  provides advanced functionality that, when used in conjunction with a traditional CAC system, helps increase the productivity of HIM coders by identifying potential coding matches found in unstructured clinical narrative text—before is it passed on to a CAC system to complete the coding process.

In the development of CLiX, we aimed to minimize the negative impact on physician workflow when the engine is deployed alongside an existing EMR.  Rather than burdening physicians, our goal is to highlight the positive impact that improved, readily available data would have on physicians carrying out their role in healthcare delivery.  The scope of the impact on physician workflow depends on how CLiX is employed within an organization and how the power of the engine is leveraged.

The core CLiX Engine can solve a host of problems and through further use will go on to solve many more in the future that are rooted in the necessity for structured and encoded data. As long as CLiX can suitably access healthcare data from unstructured sources, the engine can be integrated into solutions to solve problems such as: • Meaningful Use compliance (U.S.); • Clinical decision support challenges, where the insight into a decision is dependent on information stored in text-based clinical notes; • Healthcare analytics, where clinical data, combined with demographic and population data, provides greater insight to increasing revenue, decreasing costs and/or improving clinical outcomes.

CLiX Analytics demonstrates the maximum power of the CLiX Engine to enable clinical analytics by exposing more clinical data from clinical narrative.  This can drive and improve your existing business analytics because it is based on a finer level of granularity than what is possible with existing clinically coded data.

CLiX is primarily based on SNOMED CT, but can map to any encoding system for which a cross-map exists or can be provided. Mappings that are either provided or in development for CLiX include ICD-9, ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, ICD-10-CM (including PCS), RxNorm, OPCS 4.6, DSM IV and HCPCS.

Pre-processing is not required before submitting documents to CLiX but there are some scenarios where pre-processing will improve the effectiveness of CLiX.  The CLiX API supports a limited range of file formats for processing and naturally pre-processing of documents may be necessary where files don’t conform to these formats.  If documents contain a lot of structure, for example tabular/columnar data, then it is generally more effective to pre-process those sections if possible.

Our internal testing results indicate that CLiX can support an average throughput of 8000 pages per hour on a single application server.

You can do either – it all depends on how CLiX has been integrated into your environment. If we work together to integrate CLiX with your Point of Care systems  so that it receives a real-time feed of narrative data, it will map that data on the fly and return the structured data output in real-time. If however, your systems operate in such a way that you aggregate the data during the day and feed it to CLiX as a batch job overnight, CLiX will process the batch jobs as and when it receives them.

CLiX provides SOAP interfaces to allow seamless integration with your existing infrastructure. We can provide either a cloud-based or on-premise CLiX solution – whatever best meets your needs. If you’d like to talk to one of our sales team about CLiX, please contact us on sales@clinithink.com

The XML output from the engine defaults to a Clinithink format but can easily be configured to any particular format as part of deployment and integration into your solution.  We are working with organisations such as HL7 and IHTSDO to track any development of a common standard for the XML representation of a clinical record.  The default for this is CDA however this is not universally adopted at this time.

By encoding the content of medical records in SNOMED CT, CLiX facilitates the understanding of the record by third party decision support systems and reduces the need for the physician to enter patient data directly into the decision support system.

CLiX offers vendors of point-of-care transaction-processing applications (e.g. EMRs) significant competitive advantage by giving them the opportunity to redefine the user experience and align it to physician and other clinical users’ expectations. Physician acceptance has been identified as a critical factor in the success of EMR deployments of any size. Integrating CLiX into these applications enables vendors to transform the point-of-care experience for physicians, making data entry a much more efficient and acceptable process. In addition, vendors of analytics solutions built on conventional business intelligence technology can significantly differentiate and augment their offering by using CLiX to enable their customers’ access to otherwise unreachable data and information locked inside free text clinical narrative.

CLiX can easily be embedded into you products, in either a white box or a black box manner. With simple integration having been a key design goal during development of the engine, there is a set of fully documented SOAP APIs that expose the power of CLiX to your own products.

The CLiX Engine is very easy to integrate into your existing products and the technology has been designed around this goal. There is a standard set of SOAP APIs that the engine supports, enabling you to leverage the power of the CLiX Engine as part of your existing system. The security layer around the engine can either be managed as a component of your technology or we can plug into your existing framework. There are options to deploy the core engine on Windows or Linux, enabling integration into a wide range of technology landscapes.

Under Meaningful Use Stage 2, you must capture patient problem lists using either ICD-10 or SNOMED CT. While coding to either terminology is an unfamiliar and complex task for most clinicians, CLiX can automatically tag all problems referenced in a patient note with both ICD-10 and SNOMED. The automated capture of possible ICD-10 codes will also streamline your billing processes, while SNOMED encodings will facilitate analytics and clinical decision support not previously possible. CLiX can also support the capture of medications and allergies, saving physicians’ time filling and maintaining these lists.

Yes. CLiX rapidly extracts structured information from free-text clinical narrative. This information can be used to identify potential coding matches that can then be passed to a CAC system in order to complete the coding process. CLiX uses the SNOMED CT terminology to represent complex clinical concepts, making it possible to accurately map to much more comprehensive ICD10 codes.

No. CLiX  provides advanced functionality that, when used in conjunction with a traditional CAC system, helps increase the productivity of HIM coders by identifying potential coding matches found in unstructured clinical narrative text—before is it passed on to a CAC system to complete the coding process.

In the development of CLiX, we aimed to minimize the negative impact on physician workflow when the engine is deployed alongside an existing EMR.  Rather than burdening physicians, our goal is to highlight the positive impact that improved, readily available data would have on physicians carrying out their role in healthcare delivery.  The scope of the impact on physician workflow depends on how CLiX is employed within an organization and how the power of the engine is leveraged.

For EMR, Analytics, Transcription and CAC solution providers, Clinithink’s CNLP solution represents a unique opportunity to gain and maintain competitive advantage by offering your customers previously unavailable and innovative uses for their clinical data. CLiX is a flexible, scalable tool that will help differentiate your offering because it automatically maps valuable (and otherwise inaccessible) unstructured clinical data to a number of medical lexicons. By unlocking this previously unavailable, untapped business intelligence, you’ll help your customers significantly improve healthcare delivery and reduce clinical risk.

By encoding the content of medical records in SNOMED CT, CLiX facilitates the understanding of the record by third party decision support systems and reduces the need for the physician to enter patient data directly into the decision support system.

CLiX Analytics demonstrates the maximum power of the CLiX Engine to enable clinical analytics by exposing more clinical data from clinical narrative.  This can drive and improve your existing business analytics because it is based on a finer level of granularity than what is possible with existing clinically coded data.

CLiX is primarily based on SNOMED CT, but can map to any encoding system for which a cross-map exists or can be provided. Mappings that are either provided or in development for CLiX include ICD-9, ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, ICD-10-CM (including PCS), RxNorm, OPCS 4.6, DSM IV and HCPCS.

Pre-processing is not required before submitting documents to CLiX but there are some scenarios where pre-processing will improve the effectiveness of CLiX.  The CLiX API supports a limited range of file formats for processing and naturally pre-processing of documents may be necessary where files don’t conform to these formats.  If documents contain a lot of structure, for example tabular/columnar data, then it is generally more effective to pre-process those sections if possible.

Our internal testing results indicate that CLiX can support an average throughput of 8000 pages per hour on a single application server.

CLiX is capable of being configured for specific sets of acronyms and abbreviations for any given type of document or part of document, for any organisation.

CLiX provides SOAP interfaces to allow seamless integration with your existing infrastructure. We can provide either a cloud-based or on-premise CLiX solution – whatever best meets your needs. If you’d like to talk to one of our sales team about CLiX, please contact us on sales@clinithink.com

The XML output from the engine defaults to a Clinithink format but can easily be configured to any particular format as part of deployment and integration into your solution.  We are working with organisations such as HL7 and IHTSDO to track any development of a common standard for the XML representation of a clinical record.  The default for this is CDA however this is not universally adopted at this time.

CLiX can process any format of electronic input document provided it is in English.  This can range from structured data, semi structured data to unstructured narrative.

CLiX is unlike other NLP tools because it doesn’t only focus on understanding the structure of the language presented to it but also on ensuring that the output it produces is both clinically meaningful and compliant with appropriate healthcare interoperability standards.

CLiX is primarily based on SNOMED CT, but can map to any encoding system for which a cross-map exists or can be provided. Mappings that are either provided or in development for CLiX include ICD-9, ICD-9-CM, ICD-10, ICD-10-CM (including PCS), RxNorm, OPCS 4.6, DSM IV and HCPCS.

Pre-processing is not required before submitting documents to CLiX but there are some scenarios where pre-processing will improve the effectiveness of CLiX.  The CLiX API supports a limited range of file formats for processing and naturally pre-processing of documents may be necessary where files don’t conform to these formats.  If documents contain a lot of structure, for example tabular/columnar data, then it is generally more effective to pre-process those sections if possible.

CLiX is capable of being configured for specific sets of acronyms and abbreviations for any given type of document or part of document, for any organisation.

CLiX is typically between 75 and 90% accurate depending on the source material and how much optimisation has taken place. There are many variables that affect performance such as:  the quality of the English used in the input documents, the speciality concerned, the coverage of SNOMED CT within that speciality, etc. The optimisation process fills in the gaps in coverage of both language and SNOMED CT concepts and improves the accuracy of the results.

CLiX exposes the unstructured data that is stored inside textual, English-language medical notes (clinical narrative). Through the innovative use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology, we can automatically structure and codify narrative medical notes from the majority of captured data in healthcare systems relating to conditions, medication, treatment, procedures, allergies and interventions.  Unlocking this data provides significant access to knowledge that previously took a huge amount of time and resource to access.

The best source of information about SNOMED CT can be found on the IHTSDO website http://www.ihtsdo.org/ or visit our blog for an introduction to SNOMED and how we use it in our technology.

That’s excellent news; we look forward to speaking with you.  Either send us an email at sales@clinithink.com  or call the local sales numbers listed at http://clinithink.com/contact/.

The XML output from the engine defaults to a Clinithink format but can easily be configured to any particular format as part of deployment and integration into your solution.  We are working with organisations such as HL7 and IHTSDO to track any development of a common standard for the XML representation of a clinical record.  The default for this is CDA however this is not universally adopted at this time.