Philipp Gratzel Von Gratz of Medical Xpress writes, “Imagine a hospital where patient data from numerous sources is made accessible to ward physicians with the help of hyperlinks and intelligent indexing. Imagine a healthcare system that hands its patients – not an envelope or a CD-ROM – but an integrated dataset that allows them to truly understand their illness, and even use the Internet to obtain additional information. Imagine a radiologist who uses semantic technologies to navigate smoothly through the myriad imaging data. Welcome to the future of semantic technologies in health information retrieval.” Read more

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of nearly 150 Open Source projects and initiatives, today announced that Apache cTAKES has graduated from the Apache Incubator to become a Top-Level Project (TLP), signifying that the Project’s community and products have been well-governed under the ASF’s meritocratic process and principles. Read more

With over 30 million worldwide blog sites analyzed, the study provides fascinating insights into emotions by stage of cancer and emotions surrounding key drugs prescribed in head and neck, ovarian, breast, lung, colorectal, hepatocellular and renal cancers. It also identifies key opinion leaders(KOP’s) and influencers across the blogosphere.

In addition, the study has classified every Oncology drug mentioned across the blogosphere for its intensity of mention by category of disease. Key metrics such as emotions over time for competitive oncology drugs, emotions around treatment type (medication, radiation, surgery, etc.) as well as cohorts of physicians, patients, nurses and caregivers were analyzed. BehaviorMatrix presented findings around one of the disease categories studied, breast cancer, at the ePharma Summit. Read more

Allegient is pleased to announce a key milestone in the development of its Big Data analytics practice. Developers from Allegient and IUPUI’s School of Informatics have created SURAAK (Semantic Understanding Research in the Automatic Acquisition of Knowledge). SURAAK was developed through an $844k grant awarded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute on Aging to help caregivers of geriatric patients easily find health care solutions, increase the speed of doing research, and increase confidence in their analysis. Read more

InterSystems Corporation, a global leader in software for connected care, announced that Massachusetts-based Baycare Health Partners and Baystate Health have selected InterSystems HealthShare® as their strategic informatics platform for an innovative, new regional health information exchange (HIE). Baycare Health Partners and Baystate Health have spearheaded the formation of the Pioneer Valley Health Information Exchange, or PVIX, which will rely on HealthShare to provide a “one patient, one record” view across hospitals, medical practices, health insurance payers, laboratories, and other healthcare institutions participating in Baycare’s Pioneer Valley Accountable Care organization (PVAC) and across the western Massachusetts region. PVIX will also serve as an onramp for the region to the Massachusetts statewide health information exchange. Read more

Healthline Networks and Visual Health Solutions and Denver’s leading healthcare system, HealthONE, today announced a partnership to provide patients and physicians with Healthline’s BodyMaps application via the HealthONE website, www.HealthONEcares.com.

BodyMaps demystifies complex aspects of health by combining Healthline’s unique semantic taxonomy and Visible Health Solution’s high-quality anatomical content into a unique interactive 3D experience for users to visually explore the human body, from its largest organ to its smallest bone. BodyMaps also maps thousands of anatomical and clinical terms to simple patient-friendly synonyms, making it understandable to anyone. Read more

Following the news earlier this month that CollabRX has released a semantic clinical support tool for oncologists, CollabRX has formed a new editorial board for prostate cancer. According to the article, “CollabRx, Inc. [yesterday] announced the formation of an editorial board for prostate cancer to be led by E. David Crawford, M.D. who will serve as Chief Editor. Dr. Crawford is the distinguished Professor of Surgery, Urology, and Radiation Oncology, and head of the Section of Urologic Oncology at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. He is an active clinician, researcher, and teacher who has been recognized as one of the Best Doctors in America, one of the Best Cancer Doctors, and one of the Top 20 Urologists in the country by Men’s Health Magazine. Dr. Crawford will lead a distinguished group of physicians from leading institutions such as Yale University, University of Michigan, Cleveland Clinic, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, and others.” Read more

Bob Brewin of NextGov.com reports, “The Veterans Health Administration plans to test how advanced clinical reasoning and prediction systems can use massive amounts of archived patient data to help improve care, efficiency and health outcomes. The Veterans Affairs Department’s electronic health record system — the Veterans Health Information Systems and Technology Architecture, or VistA — stores data on 30 million veterans, including 3.2 billion clinical orders, 1.8 billion medication prescriptions and 2.3 billion vital sign measurements. This structured data is accompanied by 2 billion clinical text notes, with a growth rate of one hundred thousand additional notes per day.” Read more

A recent article out of Biomax Informatics reports, “The European STATegra Project, tasked with developing solutions to connect data production and data analysis, enables biologists to gain enhanced insight and understanding of their experiments. The European Project ‘STATegra’ has officially commenced at the Prince Felipe Research Centre (CIPF) (Valencia, Spain), with Biomax Informatics as the lead provider partner for semantic integration and knowledge development technology, a key element of the project goals. The project will focus on developing complex statistical methods wrapped into usable tools to provide integrative analysis of data from entire biological molecular systems.” Read more

Kathleen Roney of Becker’s Hospital Review recently opined, “In order for the healthcare industry to move toward preventive care and population health management, clinical information needs to flow freely across networks and between hospitals and physicians. For this reason, healthcare organizations need interoperability — efficient yet secure means for IT systems and software applications to communicate and exchange patient data. While CMS focused the latest stage of its meaningful use program on measures and objectives to encourage interoperability, the effect of that will not be seen until later in 2013 and early 2014 when providers begin to incorporate those measures and objectives into their clinical work. ” Read more