27th Feb 2013 – Ascribe, a leading provider of healthcare solutions, is pleased to announce that it has been invited to deliver a keynote presentation on the use of Big Data techniques and technologies at Strata.  Strata is the prestigious, annual international Business Intelligence conference, being held this year in San Francisco at the end of February. Ascribe’s Head of Business & Clinical Intelligence, Paul Henderson, is presenting as part of a session entitled: “Tools to turn Emergencies into Knowledge”, with Microsoft’s GM for SQL, Eron Kelly.

Ascribe have been assisting Microsoft® in delivering a Proof of Concept application to extract data from Emergency Care software and apply unique insights into this previously untapped source of knowledge.  In particular, Ascribe used Windows 8™, Office 2013®, Hadoop / HDInsight™, Bing® maps and SharePoint® to harvest data from Ascribe’s Unscheduled Care solution, Symphony.  Ascribe’s Symphony is a market-leading application in use in 26% of acute trusts across the UK and delivers many benefits to our customers, including real time patient tracking and clinical management.

Ascribe partnered with Microsoft Azure specialists Two10Degrees who are specialists in Natural Language Processing, to develop a platform that enabled a high volume of fast-flowing clinical notes to be mapped to clinical taxonomies and thus deliver structured records that could be analysed for a number of clinical and operational uses.

Paul Henderson says, “Ascribe’s reputation as a leading provider of healthcare Business Intelligence is partly founded on our innovative approach to the challenges of delivering useful and consumable information to operational and clinical staff.  Therefore the opportunity to apply the latest Microsoft technologies to the perennial problems associated with processing Case Notes, was something we really appreciated.  We also appreciated Microsoft choosing to invest in this kind of R&D in the UK – showing that the NHS can be at the leading edge of technical innovation as we make Big Data tools relevant to UK clinicians.”

Ascribe CEO Stephen Critchlow adds, “Ascribe is committed to giving clinicians the information they need in order to improve the care they deliver to patients.  All too often, vital information is buried in case notes, when it should be prominently displayed to the clinician.  The work we have been doing to augment our rich Clinical Data Repository with tools that enable us to mine text will advance our vision of Business and Clinical Intelligence to a new level.”

For more information on Strata, please visit: http://strataconf.com/strata2013/