WebChartMD's Big Data Tool Expands Use of Unstructured Data in Healthcare

JOHNSON CITY, Tenn., Oct. 15, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- WebChartMD today announced a new technology solution designed to bring a higher level of value to healthcare data found within unstructured free-text documents.  The technology, built on dramatically different database architecture, enables searches and analytics on millions of documents within seconds, and represents the next generation of data management in healthcare.  

"Our country is sitting on over twenty billion healthcare documents that have been transcribed in electronic format since the mid-1990s," said Mark Christensen, WebChartMD's Chief Operating Officer. "While those documents have always been critical to patient care, their usefulness as aggregated data sets that could contribute to our country's move toward evidence-based medicine has been limited.  With WebChartMD's new Big Data Analytics Tool, all that changes."

"Unlike previous relational database technologies such as SQL Server and Oracle, WebChartMD's utilization of NoSQL allows our system to scale horizontally with no limits," said Andrew Jebasingh, WebChartMD's Chief Technology Officer and the system's primary architect.  "That means the limitations traditional database technologies impose on exploiting data found within large collections of unstructured free-text documents is eliminated.  It's a whole new day for unstructured healthcare data."

"Many hospitals and ambulatory practices have had multiple transcription vendors over the past twenty years, with transcribed documents from each of those vendors stored in isolated silos," Christensen continued.  "WebChartMD's Big Data Analytics Tool turns those isolated silos into a unified, searchable data set – including free text located within current or past EHRs – that can be mined and utilized to improve patient care."

Use case scenarios for WebChartMD's Big Data Analytics Tool include identifying dangerous drug combinations; finding recalled drugs and recalled medical devices; diagnostic assistance for physicians; collecting and reporting Core Measures data; reporting to the National Program on Cancer Registries; real-time critical alerts on unstructured data; and trend mapping for predictive analysis.

"We see this application as a breakthrough in next generation analytics," said Andrew Jebasingh, Chief Technology Officer for WebChartMD.  "With WebChartMD's new Big Data Analytics Tool, unstructured text is indexed without the use of annotators, and complex searches can be done by users with virtually no training.  It brings Big Data analytics down to the retail level."

For more information on WebChartMD's Big Data Analytics Tool, visit www.webchartmd.com, or contact Ms. Carter Wade at 877-386-6677 ext. 107, or [email protected].

SOURCE WebChartMD