Month: July 2022

Original Post from Upwest.

Solving Data and Privacy in Healthcare

As seasons change and we ramp up to what is sure to be a busy fall, we wanted to take the time to highlight one of our recent investments: digital health-focused Lynx.MD.

Opportunity

The healthcare industry is undergoing major changes, and the emergence of federated learning has created huge opportunities for healthcare innovators to positively impact patient outcomes.

Today, medical data is largely inaccessible and underutilized by hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and other stakeholders due to the complex regulations safeguarding patient privacy. In order for AI to deliver on its promised value of transforming the healthcare industry, it needs real-world patient data to function, but accessing data for parties outside the hospital environment can take years.

This is where Lynx.MD comes in.

Solution

Lynx.MD brings an enterprise-ready, cloud-based approach to making healthcare data accessible to clinical leaders and researchers, while preserving the hospital’s ownership of data.

The #1 priority of all hospitals and clinics is to keep patient data safe and confidential. But they also understand that applying AI to anonymized patient data can dramatically improve research productivity, operations, and digital medicine product testing — all of which can lead to better patient outcomes and reduced healthcare costs.

Lynx.MD flips the model of data access in order for hospitals to preserve ownership of data. Rather than having outside users download data from the hospital to then use in AI applications, the user executes code within the hospital’s secure environment. No individual patient health information ever leaves the hospital!

Lynx helps hospitals by aggregating data from multiple sources for secure access, and provides a digital sandbox to allow both internal and external users to quickly engage with the hospital, without imposing additional workload on the hospital IT/security teams.

The Team

We are excited to partner with Lynx.MD’s exceptional team who have a rich background in AI, machine learning, and the US healthcare system. CEO Omer Dror, a repeat entrepreneur, most recently worked in machine learning and statistics research at the Weizmann Institute. CTO Hila Noga has over 15 years of experience in software development. She was most recently the CTO, CISO, and Compliance Officer at Hello Heart. Chief Medical Officer Dr. Robert Eisdorfern, MD, has over 25 years of patient care experience. He has practiced medicine in both the US and Israel and has strong connections to hospital systems in the US after serving in department head positions there.

In my early days as a doctor, digitizing health records was once the most revolutionary and foreign concept. As a physician and business leader I was frustrated by the amount of data we captured, but were unable to use to improve patient care and business optimization. As I watched data pile up never to be seen again, I quickly realized that clinical data could be the key to finding new protocols and understanding the complete patient journey. Building a solution to optimize the possibilities of this data was necessary to improve patient care. 

In 2019, we built Lynx.MD, an AI based platform that enables anonymized medical records to be securely shared so physicians, researchers and institutions can store, analyze and collaborate on healthcare data in a secure cloud environment that is HIPAA and GDPR compliant. 

Most importantly, by cutting down months of searching, clearing and accessing private data repositories, Lynx accelerates clinical research and treatment development. With our solution, researchers can now easily access and utilize this robust data.In just a few minutes, researchers can find qualified patients or curate cohorts for a clinical trial. Processes that normally take researchers months or even years are now solvable in a matter of minutes. 

Privacy concerns? Keeping healthcare data secure is a key focus for Lynx. Our approach of de-identifying data satisfies all privacy requirements while allowing organizations to be the sole authority over their information. And If the provider chooses not to share their data with other organizations, they are able to securely use Lynx as an internal analytics tool to provide business and clinical insights for their own practice. 

By accelerating partnerships in medical research, Lynx medical intelligence enables experts to explore new treatments, protocols and care paths with the potential to save millions of lives. Not only can the Lynx AI system filter, sort and analyze structured EMR data, it also has the ability to study unstructured data such as radiology images and physician notes. This unparalleled insight into quality of care and patient outcomes allows medical systems to drastically improve care paths that can positively impact patient’s lives. 

Lastly, without compromising the privacy or security of any healthcare data , Lynx has developed the right platform to enable collaboration with real-world medical data which enables researchers to solve medical mysteries in less time than was ever imaginable.