Brad Silver’s Memphis-based technology company Quire has launched next-generation software capable of helping health care providers make better decisions about how and where to direct their limited resources.
The company and its software is structured around predictive analytics. Powered by Quire’s semantic capabilities, the software basically sifts through unstructured text in clinical notes and electronic medical records. It then uses artificial intelligence to build predictive models about patient outcomes.
In other words, it’s a kind of high-tech, digital version of patient triage. And Silver, Quire’s CEO, thinks it’s the kind of thing that will only become more “impactful” as existing populations age and more strain is put on health care systems.
“It’s about sitting at a business intelligence or a clinical intelligence level within the organization and saying, ‘I have more people who need help than I have the resources to provide help,’” said Silver, whose company was founded in 2008 and was previously known as Computable Genomix.
That was before a shift in 2012 when it decided to pivot from genomics to health care. The opportunity to get involved in a larger market was one of the reasons, with Silver pointing to life sciences research of around $110 billion, compared to the $2.7 trillion overall health care market.
“This is a triage intelligence tool for providers who have to make – not individual doctors, but chief medical doctors, clinical directors and people like the heads of managed care, those kinds of folks who need this information so they can task someone to go follow up with those patients,” Silver said.
His company is based in the Memphis Bioworks building, and the company says its technology won’t disrupt any electronic medical record-keeping taking place in an organization.
Dr. Scott Fowler, president and CEO of Holston Medical Group in Kingsport, Tenn., said his organization’s use of Quire technology helps “identify what’s under the metrics” by targeting high-risk patients and helping pinpoint those most likely to have hospital admissions and readmissions. That’s done in part by helping organizations like Fowler’s get a handle on root causes that include behavioral and social issues, in addition to things like chronic illnesses, Fowler said.
Never mind that some 80 percent of patient data is unstructured, according to Quire. The company says it still has no problem capturing the nuances of individual patients with doctors practicing medicine like they always have, documenting encounters in their notes.
The Quire technology does the rest, turning stacks of doctors’ notes and electronic records into a useful, searchable database.
“So the real opportunity if you’re a provider organization like a Baptist or a Methodist is that if I can figure out how to identify more of my rising-risk patients who are about to go on a ride I’m not going to be able to get them off of, then I can help impact and improve the outcomes of that population,” Silver said. “We produce lists of patients, and it goes to people who have to make calls and say what’s my attack plan here in terms of trying to modify behaviors and improve health.”