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Stanford Researchers Design Consultation Service Utilizing Aggregate Patient Data

October 2021

In an article published this month by the New England Journal of Medicine’s Catalyst: Innovations in Care Delivery, Spectrum researchers and data scientists shared the success of their recently developed consultation service for interpreting data from electronic medical record (EMR) systems and examined how clinicians are using that data at the bedside.

“By utilizing data drawn from what was done for similar cases, we can improve the care of the next patient we treat,” explains Dr. Nigam H. Shah, Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Data Science. “This approach benefits both individual patients during their encounter and subsequent patients in comparable circumstances.”

The publication details the Stanford team’s experience in responding to the first 100 requests for consultations:

  • 10 of the consultation results led to changes to patient care,
  • 52 guided further research, and
  • 17 led to follow-up analyses, including four that were presented at medical conferences or published in peer-reviewed journals.
     
“By utilizing data drawn from what was done for similar cases, we can improve the care of the next patient we treat.” - Dr. Nigam H. Shah, Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Data Science.

Doctors who used the consultation service during the development period described it as informative, insightful, and effective, with a likelihood to recommend rate of 100%. A commercial service is now being launched with the support of Stanford Healthcare.

“Medicine has been trying this for 50 years,” explains Dr. Shah. “We are in one of the few industries that has yet to learn from how it served its past customers, however, we are now able to do this using data science and artificial intelligence.” 

Data and computational infrastructure built using Spectrum-provided resources were crucial making this service possible. In addition, the unique search engine that supported the service is available for use by other CTSA hubs and is described in an article in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.