Tech company raises $19M for cognitive computing in EHR

Looking to provide more structure for healthcare data, Apixio has announced it’s raised $19.3 million in venture capital to fund new cognitive computing platforms, reports ZDNet.

Doctors are moving to maintaining information about their patients through electronic health records. These records hold immeasurable amount of information that could unlock the potential of data-driven medicine, leading to more effective and efficient health care and the need for advancement is definitely needed with medical error still being the third leading cause of death in the United States.

Apixio is developing a cognitive computing platform called Iris, which hopes to use data mining, pattern recognition and natural language processing. The company has already analyzed data from more than six million patients.

Apixio aims to use the new funding to evaluate the quality of care a patient's been receiving. For example, if a patient suffers from diabetes, Apixio's new tool should be able to scan years of records to assess whether a diabetic patient's blood pressure has been properly controlled.

Such analysis is important as the U.S. healthcare system moves away from paying for services to paying for outcomes.

"A lot of what's done with respect to medical care is based on a physician's knowledge, what they learned 20 years ago in residency, based on studies that might not have been conducted with rock solid methods," said Apixio CEO Darren Schulte, MD. "It's not as data-driven as it should be, we want the science of medicine, not the art of medicine."