Apixio, Inc., a provider of clinical data integration, search and analytics for healthcare organizations, this week introduced a technology framework called the Clinical Knowledge Exchange (CKX), which helps healthcare systems and Accountable Care Organizations aggregate data from different sources to help clinicians compile a patient’s complete medical history to act upon it, at the annual HIMSS 2012 conference, according to a company press release.

CKX is a technical framework that pulls together information and puts it in such a form that it can be acted upon by a clinician, care manager or coder, according to the press release.

Inadequacies in the collection, processing and analysis of clinical information can slow the pace of medical services and drug development and drive up the costs of running a practice, according to d-wise.com, a life sciences company.

“Integral to CKX is its sophisticated mapping of millions of medical concepts with one another based upon their strength of association, as determined by processing very large medical corpora, standard medical terminologies and millions of clinical documents,” said Darren Schulte, chief medical officer for Apixio, in the press release.

According to the press release, the CKX framework allows the information that a patient is taking Plavix, an anti-clotting medication, to be accessed by a clinician searching that patient’s history of coronary heart disease in their electronic medical record (EHR).

“CKX can then proactively inform the clinician that Plavix was mentioned in a recent progress note’s medication list but is absent from the patient’s reconciled medication list -- a potential quality of care gap,” the press release says. In the same way, CKX can recognize “that a sudden increase in a congestive heart failure patient’s body weight, as recorded in a third-party patient portal, may be indicative of an impending medical crisis,” prompting CKX to send this data to the patient’s clinical team, potentially averting a hospital admission.

The press release explains that, using medical associations, CKX exposes clinical data sometimes “hidden in narrative text and scanned documents across the community, which has been shown to represent more than 60 percent of a patient’s key clinical history.”

Another example the press release gives is that CKX can intelligently extract patient data, and intelligently codify it, then deliver it to quality reporting and decision support tools, “in essence providing information that far better represents the patient experience,” the press release says.

CKX can also be used in billing systems, where it analyzes and identifies trends in clinical and billing data and transforms its models so that information can be “used more efficiently in a healthcare system to achieve specific financial objectives.”

 “High-value care can be realized once we turn patient data aggregated from many different sources into clinical knowledge and can easily deliver it to care providers and systems within a healthcare application network,” says Shawn Dastmalchi, CEO, Apixio. “With more provider- and consumer-facing applications connected into the CKX, the more valuable and powerful this framework becomes.”