New Partnership Will Help Maximize Health Data for Athletes

Wolters Kluwer, Health and Empericus, a patient care and athlete management platform, are teaming up to make healthcare data more accessible for athletes and their healthcare providers.

One of the challenges with the healthcare industry right now, Karen Kobelski, general manager of clinical surveillance, compliance and data solutions at Wolters Kluwer, told OTW is how medical data for one person might be stored in different silos, making it difficult to have a complete health history.

“We are living in a world where we see multiple providers and unless you as a consumer aggregate all the data you don’t have a complete picture of your health. Controlling your own medical destiny is critical.”

It is also important for all healthcare providers to have access to all the medical data for every patient they treat, she added. “If you only have one piece of the puzzle, there is so much room for error. The silo approach just leads to delays in appropriate treatment and to medical errors.”

Empericus CEO Ron Pruitt said that the partnership with Wolters Kluwer grew out of the desire to find better solutions for the lack of data and data collaboration the healthcare industry still struggles with.

Empericus will use Wolters Kluwer’s Health Language solutions to strengthen its real-time Health Intelligence Platform which provides an athlete’s complete electronic health record to share with anyone granted access like a team doctor or physical therapist.

Empericus uses the Microsoft Azure’s intelligent cloud to ingest large amounts of data including electronic health records, lab results, medication regimens, imaging interpretations, and even data from wearables and organize all in one place for better accessibility. Wolters Kluwer’s Health Language Reference Data Management, Clinical Interface Technology, and Clinical Natural Language Processing will refine the process.

The Health Language Reference Data Management will standardize all the data and then map them to a visual representation of specific body parts/regions.

The Clinical Interface Technology translates the information into terms the user is most familiar. For example, a doctor will see the terms that he or she generally uses for certain conditions or treatments and the athlete will see less technical terms that are easier for them to understand.

And Wolters Kluwer’s Clinical Natural Language Processing will take any unstructured health data like diagnoses—which is about 80% of all health data—and extract it and create a visual representation.

“Health Language curates, manages and maps all medical data to make it accessible to the consumer in their own language. It’s all about making the language of medicine accessible to everyone,” Kobelski said. “Empericus brings the data together and we are making it accessible.”

While Empericus’ initial focus is on athletes, Pruitt said they plan to eventually make these solutions available to all customers.

“We are going to see a significant shift in healthcare. There will be no more silos, instead all data will be integrated into one screen for easy access,” he said. “It’s going to make a big difference in how healthcare is delivered and allow for more informed decisions at the point of care.”

“Athletes are a great place to start, but this is where healthcare needs to go for everybody,” Kobelski said.