ZyDoc Expands NIH SBIR NLP Grant for EHR Usability Research Study to Other Facilities
Islandia, NY February 8, 2013 – ZyDoc, an Islandia, NY-based medical informatics company, has been awarded Phase I SBIR grant funding by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health for a study involving ZyDoc’s NLP-powered MediSapien™ knowledge management platform. James M. Maisel, M.D., Chairman of ZyDoc is the Principal Investigator (P.I.) for the project, entitled “Applying NLP to Free Text as an EHR Data Capture Method to Improve EHR Usability.” The study compares the documentation quality, efficiency, and user satisfaction resulting from a method of EHR data capture involving MediSapien NLP (natural language processing) with results from standard methods. ZyDoc was among only 16% of NLM grant applicants to be awarded funding in 2011. The $150,000 project is funded entirely from the grant and is a potential precursor to Phase II funding.
ZyDoc has received IRB approval from a prominent New York-area teaching hospital for the research study, and additional test sites are now being sought. Researchers at Columbia University will be participating in the study, which also measures the accuracy of ICD-10 coding generated by MediSapien NLP. Facilities interested in participating in the study, including public or private hospitals and physician groups, are invited to contact James Maisel at grant@medisapien.com.
MediSapien was launched at the HIMSS Annual Conference in February 2012 expanding the ZyDoc family of documentation and knowledge management solutions featuring NLP-powered generation of structured codes from unstructured text. Those codes are formulated in industry standard HL7 CDA Level III R2 messages suitable for insertion in any ONC-certified EHR. MediSapien solutions are primarily marketed through its channel partner network, which includes EHRs, Billing and RCM providers, Analytics companies, and MTSOs. For EHR Channel Partners, MediSapien offers a value-added service to provide objective third-party usability evaluations. For clinician end-users, MediSapien can be utilized in conjunction with existing or planned EHR installations, and can facilitate compliance with Meaningful Use mandates.
“This is an exciting time for ZyDoc and MediSapien” explains Maisel. “While we prove out our solutions in the marketplace in 2013, the grant allows ZyDoc to scientifically measure the usability, efficiency and accuracy of MediSapien. In the study, doctors will complete typical medical encounters with dictation vs. EHR data entry with keyboard and mouse. The text will be inserted into the EHR along with the structured coded data extracted by MediSapien. The resultant EHR documentation will be analyzed by document experts and graded for accuracy and other parameters. The SBIR-funded study is a potential precursor to Phase II-funding.”
A research collaborator on the study, David Kaufman, PhD, formerly a research scientist at Columbia University and now at the University of Arizona, offers this perspective, “Although EHRs are promising tools for improving healthcare, it is widely known that the user experience is frequently suboptimal resulting in dissatisfaction and low rates of adoption. This is partly due to the fact that clinicians spend many hours interacting with unwieldy systems documenting patient records. MediSapien is a promising instrument that may serve to reduce the cognitive burden on clinicians and enable EHRs to be instruments of clinical communication and tools that can greatly enhance patient care.”
About ZyDoc and MediSapien
Based in Islandia, New York, ZyDoc is a national leading-edge medical knowledge management company founded in 1993 to develop medical informatics solutions. Under the leadership of James M. Maisel, M.D., Chairman, the company has developed award-winning documentation and knowledge management solutions. The e-transcription infrastructure and speech recognition solutions are now complemented by the disruptive enabling MediSapien NLP technology. The ZyDoc suite of tools can be assembled into seamless flexible solutions for documentation and knowledge management needs. Each award-winning, easy to use module offers the best-in-class performance and is designed to be seamless integrated in a scalable, interoperable, HIPAA secure customizable solution. Cloud based ZyDoc solutions are always accessible and robust and offer enhanced capabilities for medical knowledge workers.
Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R43LM011165. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.
