HLA Wins NSW Premier’s iAward for Public Sector Innovation

Health Language Analytics’ (HLA) HORIZON product was awarded the NSW Premier’s iAward for Public Sector Innovation at the 25th Annual AIIA iAwards ceremony held on the night of 7th June 2018.

13/06/2018 – SydneyAustralian innovator Health Language Analytics was named Winner of the NSW Premier’s iAward for Public Sector Innovation at the Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) NSW iAwards, the nation’s leading awards program for innovation in the digital economy. The iAward was presented by Martin Hoffman, Secretary – Department of Finance, Services & Innovation.

HLA’s Horizon uses Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to drive a Clinical Natural Language Processing engine.  Unlike earlier generations of Natural Language Processing which were rules-based, HORIZON is a next-generation technology that utilises statistical-based semantic concept recognition and a coding inference engine to attain an extremely high accuracy previously considered unachievable. Concomitantly it has invented a patent-pending Language Engineering methodology to rapidly assemble and install a processing production line for the client’s use.

Professor Jon Patrick, Founder and CEO said, “It is wonderful to receive this Premier’s award as an affirmation for all the hard work our team has put into making a world-beating solution for accessing the 80% of clinical data that until now has been hidden within clinical text reports.”

HLA is working with the California Cancer Registry which serves a population of 39 million and handles 175,000 new cancer cases per year. HORIZON separates reportable pathology reports from non-pathology reports with an accuracy of 98%+ and then understands and extracts clinical concepts from unstructured text at 97.82% accuracy. There is no other commercial system that can achieve these accuracies in understanding free-text clinical documents.

Horizon has been deployed locally at the NSW Cancer Institute, the SAN hospital, and Melbourne East General Practice Network (MEGPN), to name a few.

The result is that HLA enables fast, accurate handling of unstructured clinical text reports. Clients are therefore able to attack the large backlog (often measured in years) of uncoded documents. The result is a far quicker and more targeted analysis of cancer cases across populations.

In summary:

  • More Accurate than manual coding
  • Much Faster than manual coding
  • Operates 24 X 7
  • Scales to handle thousands and millions of clinical documents
  • SaaS delivery model – Minimal interruption to existing workflows
  • Statistically based engine – The more data HORIZON ingests, the greater the accuracy

The AIIA CEO, Rob Fitzpatrick explained:

Each year the awards shine a light on the exceptional achievements of those at the forefront of Australian innovation, and the projects shaping our modern economy. We’re proud to provide recognition and encouragement to people prepared to bring an idea to life, enabled by technology. Whether they’re in start-ups, the public sector, community services, academia, or private enterprise, small and large, the work of the finalists is an inspiration to us all.

HLA works with government departments, hospitals, and cancer registries to help them with their research, patient history and analysis of clinical free-text documents with the aim of reducing the impact of cancer on our society.

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