San Diego, Calif. (PRWEB) September 23, 2011
Parity Computing, Inc. announced today that it has been awarded a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) grant of $150,000 by the National Institutes of Health for development of a software system to automate identification of clinical trial results that are relevant to individual patients. Parity's Dr. Chris Rosin will serve as principal investigator, and Prof. Shlomo Argamon of the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago will be collaborating with Parity on the project. The new system will automate a critical aspect of evidence-based medicine by generating structured representations of trial results and patient records, and then quantitatively comparing them to find matches that could help inform individual patient care decisions.
"This grant supports the important work that Parity is undertaking to make evidence-based medicine relevant to the health of individual patients within the everyday cycle of care," said Steve Nathan, Parity's CEO. "Most physicians are hard-pressed to stay on top of the volume of medical literature that may be relevant to their patients. The technology arising from this project will be deployed to assist both physicians and patients in making decisions based on the best and latest information."
Parity sees an urgent need to align the delivery, administration, and evaluation of healthcare with the most up-to-date information about individual patients, procedures, and medications. This has the potential to improve healthcare outcomes and cost-effectiveness on a large scale. Evidence available from published results of clinical trials is a very important part of the information landscape. The standard approach to leveraging clinical trial results depends on sustained, labor-intensive efforts by physicians to identify and study new evidence relevant to their patients. Current attempts to automate this process with software tools are incomplete and limited to applying simplified, pre-digested guidelines to the available coded patient data, which misses many important aspects expressed in the original clinical record. Parity's new system will overcome these limitations by automatically identifying published research studies that contain the evidence most relevant to specific patient clinical records, including the information originally recorded only in narrative text.
About Parity Computing
Parity Computing, founded in 1999, provides powerful data mining, analytics, and decision-support systems to publishers and enterprises in the science, technology, and medical (STM) industry. The company's newly formed Parity Health Systems division is launching the Clinical VigilanceTM product line to monitor disparate healthcare data sources and create better patient outcomes at lower costs by providing evidence-based, disease-specific clinical decision support. For further information see http://www.paritycomputing.com and http://www.parityhealthsystems.com.
About Shlomo Argamon
Shlomo Argamon is Associate Professor of Computer Science and Director of the Linguistic Cognition Laboratory at the Illinois Institute of Technology. He also holds a courtesy appointment as Senior Fellow of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, DC. His current research is the application of machine learning to functional analysis of natural language, with applications to national security, biomedical informatics, and humanities scholarship.