Researchers from Stanford (Calif.) Medicine developed a new type of medical consult that uses millions of EHRs to bring insights to physicians.
Five study insights:
- The Clinical Informatics Consult Service is a platform for physicians looking for more information on illnesses that are hard to treat and diagnose, according to a Sept. 15 news release on the study. Physicians can use the platform to look at millions of deidentified cases for data that may help with treating their patients.
- The study detailed the results of the first 100 consults, which were conducted in 2017 and 2018.
- "Medicine has been dreaming about doing this for 50 years,'' said Nigam Shah, PhD, associate CIO for data science at Stanford Healthcare and professor of medicine and biomedical data sciences at Stanford University, who led the study.
- When a physician submitted a question, the team translated the request into code that a search engine would process. The search engine searched through medical records for matching information. Results were narrowed until only individual records remained. Results were returned to physicians within 72 hours.
- The service is available at Stanford Healthcare through Atropos Health, a company that licenses the technology from Stanford. It is also available to other hospitals for a fee.