Transactional systems are everywhere. Robust knowledge systems are hard to find.
Transactional systems can capture many things, but they are principally good at recognizing and manipulating numbers. If what you need is a pie chart, that problem has been solved.
In contrast, knowledge systems have to be good at recognizing anything we represent in language, even visual language. And they have to be good at guessing what we want. This means knowledge systems have to deal with imprecision, because most knowledge isn’t precise. This is a concept not found anywhere in the transactional system universe. Unfortunately, healthcare (like virtually every other profession) is dominated by transactional systems.
With a robust knowledge system, end users can explore. They can use it to find things they can’t exactly articulate, or find things “like” this or that thing, pluck facts from masses of messy data, and even have a kind of conversation with a super-intelligent digital assistant.
This is a great vision long in the making. But knowledge-based technologies – including semantic engines, natural language processors, metadata extractors, text miners, and data translators – are many and varied. Few ever leave the laboratory, and even fewer scale to productive use.
Care Commons has identified the technologies that work – the ones that are reliable, affordable, scalable, easiest to use, and most flexible. And our team has unparalleled experience in quickly solving the complex technical problems associated with knowledge-based data, whether structured, semi-structured, or unstructured, housed on any storage platform or data architecture.
The result is a new class of applications that empower healthcare professionals and consumers in the pursuit of optimal medical and wellness decisions in many areas including:
- Outpatient pathway management
- Symptom and diagnostics support
- Physician identification and referral
- Billing system code migration
- Uniquely individualized patient education and motivation
- Workflow management and best-practice adoption
- Patient outcome and quality of care measurement
- Care coordination across multiple parties and information systems
