UPMC Data Collection, Management Partnership Aims to Advance Patient Care

Pittsburgh-based UPMC Enterprises, the innovation, commercialization, and venture capital arm of UPMC, has launched a partnership and licensing agreement with data management company Clearsense, which will allow the company to integrate UPMC’s unstructured data platform into its own data management platform.

According to the press release, Clearsense’s platform is used by over 400 hospitals across the US. But unstructured data remains a challenge for interpreting and analyzing patient information at these organizations. The new partnership is designed to help address those challenges by combining the capabilities of the Clearsense and UPMC platforms, enabling providers to perform more in-depth data analyses.

Since a large portion of patient data resides in unstructured clinical notes, normalizing and utilizing this data can be both time-consuming and costly for health systems. UPMC’s platform, known as Alexandria Charts, helps combat these issues by providing tools to aggregate, normalize, and transform unstructured data. Doing so allows developers and health systems to build new healthcare data and analytics solutions, the press release states.

"Based on years of development by our highly skilled team — and created to meet the demands of our - health system and portfolio companies — Alexandria Charts is an important part of our vision to provide high-quality data to health care organizations," said Brenton Burns, executive vice president of UPMC Enterprises, in the press release. "By partnering with Clearsense, we can now continue to bring this innovative technology to more companies and health systems to make the best decisions for the patients they serve."

Under the partnership, Clearsense will collaborate with engineers and healthcare experts from UPMC to support the integration of Alexandria Charts with Clearsense’s Next Generation Data Management and Delivery Platform. Through the integration, the partners hope to enhance and expand the use of patient data to improve cost-effectiveness and quality of care.

This is UPMC’s latest effort to leverage data management and clinical analytics to improve care quality.

In July, UPMC and Microsoft launched a five-year collaboration aimed at expanding and modernizing the health system’s data management, warehousing, and analytics infrastructure to improve patient care.

Other healthcare providers are also turning to data-driven solutions to gain more actionable insights into the patients they serve and improve outcomes.

This week, Google Cloud and Fitbit Health Solutions launched the Device Connect for Fitbit solution, which aims to give healthcare organizations a more holistic view of patients outside clinical settings using data from wearable devices.

Cardiologists at The Hague’s Haga Teaching Hospital in the Netherlands are currently piloting the solution. They have undertaken a study examining the solution's efficacy in aiding the early identification and prevention of vascular disease.

Additionally, Boston Scientific and provider-created data collective Truveta announced a strategic collaboration to improve long-term patient care and gain insights into health disparities through data and analytics earlier this week.