As many as 35,000 people visit NorDx Labs every month, generating 50,000 orders and more than 1 million test results. Those results are stored in data silos, ready for use by the Scarborough, Maine-based independent clinical laboratory’s long list of healthcare clients.
Until last year, however, data from disparate silos couldn’t be extracted and combined that easily. Denis Rochette, the company’s IT director, said a customer looking for lab information as well as financial data would have a pay a considerable fee and wait a while for NorDx to manually compile the data into one report.
“The two (databases) didn’t talk to each other,” he said. “And when every application has its own database, that’s a lot of information.”
Because NorDx’s customers were beginning to ask for more complex reports, the company turned to InforSense, a Cambridge, Mass.-based provider of business intelligence platforms, to develop a platform that would allow the lab to merge and analyze data from multiple sources.
The new platform allows NorDx to provide real-time clinical and billing reports for healthcare providers, insurance companies and other customers, allowing the lab to maximize its revenue stream, develop interactive reports and provide customers with more complete information. Those capabilities are particularly helpful as NorDx participates in Health InfoNet, Maine’s pilot health information exchange.
“Sharing data is a part of everyone’s future in healthcare,” said Rochette.
The NorDx deal is InforSense’s first with a laboratory, and marks its continued push into the healthcare sector. The company has attended the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) show the past two years and is working with Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Water Reed Army Medical Center, among others.
Simon Beaulah, the company’s senior marketing manager, says InforSense started in the pharmaceutical industry, but is moving toward healthcare as that industry moves toward personalized medicine.
“It’s very much around providing fast answers to the complex questions,” he said. “Most reporting tools aren’t that complex, but they do get complicated when you bring together databases.”
Beaulah sees business intelligence software as “the future of personalized medicine.” By providing platforms for healthcare providers to mine and compare data, he said, providers can more easily affect clinical decisions, as well as identify problems before they occur. On the payer side, he said, BI platforms can be used to develop treatment programs for chronic diseases like diabetes.
“It’s a way of identifying best practices and rolling them out more widely,” he said.
Last December, InforSense software was integrated into Alzheimer’s disease studies in the United Kingdom to help develop early diagnostic tools and personalized treatments for mental health researchers. The software was used by the National Institute for Health Research Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at the South London and Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, which is working with the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London.
“Our research centers on understanding the molecular and cellular events that take place in the brain in Alzheimer’s disease and in particular we are working on blood based biomarkers to aid early diagnosis,” said Simon Lovestone, Professor of Old Age Psychiatry at King’s College London and Director of the Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health, in a press release supplied by InforSense. “The translational solutions that InforSense provides will enable us to have an integrated data set under a common system that informaticians, researchers and clinicians can all use to access and analyze data. This will result in improved data sharing and removal of access bottlenecks, speeding up the speed and accuracy of novel biomarker identification.”
