My Role
I led the development from ideation through development and launch of MedStream Designer – an analytical platform for extracting and analyzing clinical data. I was responsible for creating the vision, integration specifications with EMR systems, and leading all phases of development and testing. I worked with business development and sales teams on a go-to-market strategy and initiated a partnership with an EMR provider. I worked directly with clinicians, collecting requirements and feedback throughout the development process and during post-launch support.
Challenge
During my tenure as a bioinformatics researcher at a leading Polish Cancer Institute, I quickly realized that a vast amount of Electronic Medical Records were inaccessible to clinicians and researchers for analysis and research. I discovered that clinicians require very specific search capabilities, often needing to understand longitudinal relationships between medical events and define inclusion and exclusion criteria that are time-dependent, along with advanced text search capabilities.
Solution
Faced with the absence of a commercial tool that would fulfill most of the requirements to identify and analyze cohorts of patients, I initiated a partnership with Transition Technology to create a system that could extract and analyze clinical data effectively, encompassing full-text searches and temporal relationships between events.
Key Features:
- Intuitive, drag-n-drop, no-code interface for finding a cohort of patients based on treatment patterns and course of disease.
- Build-in international diagnoses and procedures codes such as ICD-10, ICD-9 and ICD-O
- Dynamically created descriptions in natural language based on user actions.
- Full-text search in medical notes
- View patient history or export longitudinal data for further analysis
- Integration with external databases like The National Center for Biotechnology Information database.
Results
MedStream Designer (MSD), was integrated with CompuGroup Medical’s EHR system—one of Europe’s largest providers of electronic records software—and has been implemented in over eight of Poland’s largest hospitals. This integration has democratized access to essential clinical data for thousands of doctors and researchers. The system’s impact led to Transition Technologies SA being nominated for the Polish Innovation Award 2017 in the category of Innovation in Medicine for developing and implementing MedStream Designer as a crucial component of the national cancer research platform, ONKO.SYS. In the United States, MedStream Designer was chosen by Athena Health for its “More Disruption Please” partnership program.
Key Values Delivered to Clinicians:
- Clinical Trial Recruitment: MSD streamlines the process of identifying potential candidates for clinical trials by automating the selection based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, including temporal relations and full-text searches. This is crucial as many patients miss clinical trial opportunities due to not being identified in time, given the narrow eligibility windows related to their disease progression.
- Efficiency in Retrospective Analysis: The system reduces the time to identify patients for retrospective analysis from weeks to minutes, eliminating the need for coding.
- Informed Treatment Decisions: Clinicians can make better-informed treatment decisions by having easy access to all similar cases and treatment histories, which is particularly valuable for analyzing rare side effects or identifying patients with rare diseases.
- Risk Identification: MSD enhances patient safety by quickly identifying at-risk individuals through automatic alerts based on customized criteria, such as severe side effects from previous treatments.
- Research Data Collection: The system drastically reduces the time needed to compile datasets for research, significantly boosting research efficiency.