A Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project between OLM Systems Ltd and Henley Business School at the University of Reading has been rated ‘Outstanding’ by Innovate UK.
The two-year project aimed to develop digital tools which allow health and social care organisations to search and analyse the huge textual data contained within clinical records.
The new text analytics tool was built on the Nalytics search and discovery platform, with the Informatics Research Centre at Henley providing further capabilities.
The Research Centre is renowned in this field, bringing valuable insight and experience from the world of text analytics. Text analytics, which analyses textual data to find hidden associations and patterns, has the potential to be applied in the health and social care sector and may also have wider applications in other areas which use large volumes of textual data such as the legal and education sectors.
Professor Keiichi Nakata, Lead Academic for the project and Head of Business Informatics, Systems and Accounting from Henley Business School said:
This was an exemplary KTP project – the company had a solid technology base, and together with the expertise of the academic team and a shared project goal, a new text analytics tool was developed. It demonstrates how academic research can contribute to new business technology. In the era of digitalisation, text data are generated and stored by businesses and organisations on a massive scale which can no longer be effectively processed by humans, resulting in missed opportunities. Text analytics tools, such as the one developed in this project, can provide the means to explore large text data sets and discover new insights and opportunities by mining the data.”
Peter O’Hara, Founder and CEO of OLM Systems said:
This KTP project was a great example of how Nalytics technology can benefit the healthcare sector. There is a massive opportunity to utilise the wealth of unstructured data to help support decision making and influence more effective interventions and positively impact the health and wellbeing of patients. Not only has the project introduced and inspired significant technological developments to Nalytics, but this technological focus has also had a significant positive side effect where we find ourselves positively positioned in the currently emerging and exciting field of Artificial Intelligence (AI).”
