The CLiX Engine
Modern medicine depends on clinical data captured in a computable, structured form to complete vital processes in healthcare such as administering a hospital, understanding a patient’s history, performing biomedical research and billing for care.
While current EMRs capture significant amounts of structured data, care providers still have to refer to unstructured clinical narrative to really understand a patient’s medical history and care. The narrative parts of the record are usually rich, granular sources of data, containing important, relevant, contextualized information. However, without processing of some kind, this narrative information is “lost” in electronic form or buried in a paper chart.
The CLiX engine structures and indexes clinicians’ notes to create detailed, accurate and actionable data, forming the basis for other high value activities that relate to patient outcomes, healthcare performance and revenue optimization
How does CLiX work?
CLiX’s natural language parser scans free-text or unstructured clinical notes to identify the concepts described in the text, and expresses this information in a structured format (such as ICD-10 or SNOMED CT) that is easily incorporated into existing systems and workflows.
How does CLiX makes a difference?
Manually capturing and analyzing unstructured data is costly, whether in physician time at the point of care or through back office teams. CLiX minimizes the expense by automating the process of identifying medical concepts within clinical notes and suggesting coding matches.
In addition, indexing the concepts it finds dramatically increases the usefulness and accessibility of the information throughout the healthcare delivery chain, enabling it to be re-purposed to support:
- Streamlining the billing process by reducing the burden on back office coders;
- Preserving physicians’ preferred method of capturing patient notes;
- Support for clinical decision-makers at the point-of-care;
- Insight into quality metrics and operational planning;
- Easing the transition to complex coding systems (ICD-10CM);
- Summarizing and sharing a patient’s history with multidisciplinary healthcare teams; and
- Analytics to identify particular trends or patterns in clinical data.
How can I use CLiX to improve patient care, quality reporting or meet reimbursement requirements?
The CLiX engine is a versatile, scalable solution that produces output which can be easily integrated into existing systems and leveraged in many ways. The flexibility of CLiX technology combined with the portability of the output means that organizations can build CLiX into 3rd party platforms and build custom applications to achieve their objectives. Deployed either as a secure, cloud-hosted web service or installed locally at your institution, CLiX’s services can be tailored and used for everything from one-off text-mining projects to live use in an EMR interface.
What output can I expect from the CLiX engine?
The input text is processed by the CLiX engine and the identified medical concepts are output as SNOMED CT expressions. SNOMED CT is a powerful emerging standard. It is a rich medical terminology that supports detailed and precise representation of clinical content, enabling accurate storage and communication of healthcare data electronically. It is being increasingly adopted by governments worldwide as the preferred standard for point of care data and is scheduled to become mandatory in the US in 2015. CLiX provides output in SNOMED CT and can also provide mappings to other important coding standards including, ICD9, ICD10, RxNorm, etc.
The CLiX web service returns its output as an XML document containing not only the SNOMED CT descriptions but also related information about the context of the input text. The input text is also returned as output, marked up to flag the source words and phrases for which corresponding concepts have been found.
This rich output makes it easy for system developers and end-user organizations to leverage the power of CLiX in analyzing narrative clinical data for many different value-adding purposes.
