Author: Daeja Thomas

The Lynx MD platform provides secure, privacy-compliant access to real-world patient data to improve clinical practices and patient care

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn., September 7, 2022 – Lynx.MD today announced that they have partnered with ENT Partners (ENT&C Management, LLC), a leading Physician Practice Management Company (PPMC) specializing in the ear, nose, throat and sleep industry, to advance ENT medical research and clinical practice. Using the cloud-based Lynx MD platform, ENT Partners can securely, and with privacy controls in place, share accumulated real-world health data with academics, pharmaceutical companies and MedTech communities to support the development of innovative medical protocols and technologies.

Jim Feinstein, ENT Partners CEO, said, “ENT Partners is committed to helping doctors provide comprehensive ENT patient care and growing practices. With Lynx MD, we can take advantage of our expanded data insights to give our practices, physicians and patients access to cutting-edge technology to improve care and outcomes for our patients. The Lynx platform makes it easy to upload, share and access identified and de-identified real-world data from diverse sources, allowing providers to collaborate on current patient care pathways and enabling data analysts to extract insights that can help transform the future of patient care.”

ENT Partners provides the opportunity to improve outcomes for ENT patients globally by contributing data to the world’s largest repository of structured and unstructured ENT-related medical data. The Lynx platform provides advanced firewall algorithms and the application of medical-grade cybersecurity protection protocols, enabling partners to securely collaborate with de-identified, real-world data to drive ENT research. Healthcare organizations, like ENT Partners, maintain full control of what data is anonymized and when and with whom data is shared. The actual data never leaves the ENT Partners’ private cloud environment. Researchers receive secure permissioned access to perform large-scale computations, modeling and analysis within the platform.

“Streamlining real-world data access for research and innovation is the lifeblood for technological advancements in medicine. From using medical images to detect risk factors, to leveraging longitudinal medical records to design effective clinical trials, and conduct large-scale population-level analyses, health data has the power to transform people’s lives. However, innovative medical research and development requires expansive datasets,” said Lynx MD CEO and Co-Founder Omer Dror. “With Lynx, healthcare providers, medtech and life sciences researchers and data analysts can securely collaborate and accelerate diagnostic and therapeutic solutions that can help improve patient outcomes. Partnering with ENT Partners contributes to our mission to deliver the largest secure, privacy-compliant, real-world ENT dataset for researchers around the world.”

About Lynx.MD

Lynx.MD is the leading cloud-based platform that unlocks real-world health data at scale. The platform enables the sharing and analysis of rich, unstructured data, securely connecting healthcare organizations with the life sciences and MedTech community. Lynx provides an environment for deep learning studies, enabling researchers to investigate data from multiple sources. For more information, visit Lynx MD or meet us at AAO-HNS 2022.

About ENT Partners

ENT Partners offers physicians a customizable, boutique approach to partnering and managing your practice. ENT Partners provides access to a team of proven healthcare experts who know how to support physicians and their management teams. Our focus is on areas with actionable deliverables that will improve results and provide you real value. ENT Partners is committed to helping doctors provide comprehensive ENT patient care and to growing practices through corporate affiliation. To learn more about ENT Partners, visit: https://entpartners.com/

This release was issued through WebWire®. For more information, visit http://www.webwire.com.

SOURCE Lynx.MD

What will it take to accelerate the pace of medical innovation? This question has a simple answer: data. But the challenge is accessing and using data in a secure way, that is compliant with privacy regulations and mindful of patient privacy.

At Lynx.MD, we’ve taken on this challenge with a three-sided exchange that enables academia, private providers, and research teams to contribute, access, and work with de-identified patient data inside a highly-secure, cloud-based environment.

Side 1: De-identified medical data from thousands of patient records, physicians’ notes, drug treatments, and more.

Side 2: Researchers and data scientists that use real-world patient data to develop AI models to enhance clinical trials or provide insights on the patient journey.

Side 3: Health providers that contribute data to the network to support healthcare research and harvest insights to improve quality of care.

We not only prioritize the privacy and security of patient health data, but we’ve also developed tools and processes built with security in mind, so physicians and patients can be confident that health information remains private, while researchers and developers can safely and securely use that data to model and validate new treatment options, develop medicines to assist those treatments, and identify preventative approaches to improve healthcare for all. Read on to learn how the exchange works and what benefits it brings to participants.

Protecting real-world patient data

The privacy and security of confidential medical information are of paramount importance to patients and their healthcare providers. Yet, as technology advances, such as cloud computing and pervasive internet access, while healthcare providers can quickly obtain access to patient records and conveniently share information to support patient care, poor security protocols and irregular standards create an enormous risk of exposing confidential patient data to groups looking to profit from it. As a result, governments worldwide developed stringent standards that protect medical data, such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Privacy regulations define sensitive or personal data as one that can be traced back to a person, directly or indirectly. Most privacy regulations offer frameworks and guidelines for making such data safer and not personal, like the de-identification guidelines of HIPAA Safe Harbor or anonymization and pseudonymisation in GDPR.

The Lynx Privacy Firewall offers military-grade security to ensure all data is HIPAA- and GDPR- compliant. The platform performs on-the-fly de-identification to enable users to work with real-world patient data while staying compliant. Lynx makes sure that the data, if need be, is anonymized before it is ever made available for third-party researchers. Data never leaves the data provider’s secure infrastructure and private cloud environment. Lynx provides strong end-to-end encryption and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure that data transfers are secure.

More data, deeper research, faster insights

The advancement of medtech solutions is highly dependent on real-world data as better, faster decisions depend on medical teams having a holistic view of each patient. Lynx gives developers and data scientists the ability to quickly access millions of data points to test and run models that enable more rapid statistical analysis or predictive analytics. Further, rather than reach out to 20 different healthcare providers to request high-value clinical data, teams are able to access, curate and combine specific datasets of their choosing from one, secure location.

Because the data resides inside a secure environment and can’t be downloaded, Lynx provides a data science workbench fully equipped with common data science tools. Teams can write Python, R or SQL code inside the Lynx system. And as clinical data gets updated, all the graphs and visualizations update automatically in a dashboard.

Advancing healthcare and patient outcomes

Life sciences rely on real-world patient and clinical data for research and development, and yet acquiring this data has been burdensome across the board. That’s why a medical intelligence platform like Lynx that provides secure access to large, diverse real-world patient datasets can accelerate the growth of diagnostic and therapeutic solutions.

For example, real-world evidence can greatly improve clinical trial outcomes—from identifying inclusion criteria for clinical trials to increasing patient diversity in studies. Or for healthcare providers, amassed clinical data can drive organizational and clinical performance or ensure products and solutions are developed based on real-world data.

Through the Lynx trusted research environment, all parties can elect to securely share and learn from real-world clinical data insights to understand the impact of therapeutics, treatments and medical devices on patients.

To learn more about the Lynx platform and how it can help your organization, contact us.

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.

Data is the driving force behind future advancements in medical technology and the development of next-generation diagnostics & therapeutics. To make a powerful impact on the health of millions of people requires unparalleled access and the ability to collaborate using high-quality, real-world patient data that is securely shared and minimizes the risk to patient privacy.

From early detection to outcome prediction, healthcare data can unlock enormous possibilities for medical innovation and gains, such as:

• Clinical decision-support AI for reducing medical errors;
• The use of medical images to diagnose emerging medical conditions;
• Expanding access to quality care for underserved populations;
• Providing longitudinal medical records to reduce readmissions and run effective preventative care programs that improve outcomes and reduce the cost of care.

Yet, gaining access to real-world patient data and rich datasets for collaboration and research has been prohibitively burdensome and a bottleneck to progress for several reasons:

• Prior methods for de-identifying patient records reduce the utility of the data. In addition, because de-identification changes the data, there’s a gap between how the AI models were trained and what the data was tested on, essentially leaving out critical information.
• Aggregation and de-identification of real-world patient data is such a big undertaking that it’s usually done once, and then the data remains static. In other words, new sources that could feed or update the data models aren’t used.
• Linking to and querying information sources can result in personal data re-identification, making this practice risky for patient privacy for healthcare organizations.

That’s where Lynx comes in. We are a medical intelligence platform that brings together disparate elements of the healthcare data ecosystem to empower truly collaborative research and development at scale without compromising security or privacy. Leading medical institutions globally trust our platform with millions of patient records.

• The Lynx platform processes structured (such as forms) and unstructured (such as physician’s notes or medical images). Patient data is de-identified on the fly and always compliant with privacy regulations.
• The Lynx platform processes and makes data available in real-time, making datasets fresh and continuously updated.
• Platform users can browse the Lynx catalog and explore diverse datasets inside a private cloud environment that is military-grade secure.
• The Lynx Data Science Workbench provides the tools needed to train and validate models inside the private cloud environment, giving the researchers the flexibility and tools they need.

The Lynx cloud-based medical intelligence platform accelerates the time-to-market and time-to-value healthcare solutions by allowing customers to collect, analyze and share medical data without compromising patient privacy or data security. We’re proud to be backed by top-tier VCs, including Amdocs, iAngels, Mizmaa, New York Life Ventures, Seed IL, Triventures, and UpWest.

Everyone ends up interacting with the health system and tackling these issues is key to transforming the medical care we all receive and integrating novel solutions into an otherwise traditional industry. Solving these challenges will help re-invent healthcare as a data-first ecosystem bringing the best level of care to the people that really need it.

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Want to learn more? Sign up for a demo of Lynx

A letter from our founders

At the start of 2022, Lynx.MD could only imagine the amazing growth and partnerships we would experience this year. As founders, our goal has always been to break down the barriers to sharing healthcare information. We knew this would be the greatest challenge but would result in improvements in patients care. The use of data has revolutionized other industries, but healthcare has continued to be left behind. We knew that building a secure platform would bring together healthcare organizations from across the ecosystem to collaborate using real-world clinical data that would influence the development of new therapeutics and create value for our partners. Unlock this value close to home first was the first step. Our vision was realized this year when we announced our partnerships with Clalit and the Ministry of Health, releasing the bottleneck for accessing data generated by millions of patient encounters.

Through our partnerships with companies like Gastro Health, ENT & Allergy Associates, ENT Partners and Albany ENT, we have created specialty-focused clinical data repositories in gastroenterology, allergy and otolaryngology spaces. Collectively this represents data from hundreds of millions of patient encounters—effectively telling the stories of these patients, their disease progression, and the management of their care. Bringing together data silos and being able to follow patients across their journey with multi-modal data of medical records, PACS imaging, and other data systems brings new opportunities to help healthcare realize the potential locked away in the data. Organizations need visibility through analytics into the true cost of delivering care to achieve operational goals while meeting the needs of their community. Researchers in all related industries need secure access to anonymized real-world patient data to bring diagnostic technology, and novel therapeutics to market faster and safely. This is an imperative that we all witnessed during the pandemic. Our partners have been helping us evolve use cases for our platform to meet the evolving needs of the industry as it phase-changes with the completion of the crisis.

One area where our partners have provided deep insights is into the new regulatory and policy directives that are making collaboration with data harder, yet more imperative. Changes in EU regulations that require medical devices be proven on EU citizens, the NIH Data Management and Sharing (DMS) policy, and an industry awakening to the damage created by population demographic bias in research all point to equitable, secure sharing of real-world clinical data. Collaboration is no longer an option – it is now a business necessity. Platforms, like Lynx, are one way for healthcare providers to maintain the governance of data while collaborating in a secure, private manner. This challenges historical approaches for data sharing and where data had to be transported. Today, data holders can retain sensitive patient data and only allow permissioned users to access the data in compliance with new and existing regulations.

Lynx would not be able to meet the high expectations of our partners if we did not continue to invest in our people. With the addition of new team members across the company, we tripled our staff. Our presence in the US, with new customers and employees also grew. We welcomed new executives to our leadership team. Dr. Alyssa Abo, a Lynx champion from Children’s National Hospital, joined our team as Vice President of Medical Affairs and Strategic Partnerships. Alyssa brings the client perspective to our team and to every client engagement. Jody Bare joined Lynx as Vice President of Sales. Jody is leading our US growth strategy with a focus to bring new health systems into the ecosystem. And, Eyal Herman most recently joined us as Vice President of Product. With the platform growing so quickly, it was time to bring in a strong product leader with experience building teams and directing the development of new solutions in cloud, AI, data, and healthcare.

As we close out 2022 we want to recognize all of our team members that worked countless hours across geographies to deliver a truly powerful platform that is exceeding our customer’s expectations. And, we thank our partners in healthcare and in business for opening our minds to new ideas and the potential created through the Lynx.MD platform.

We look forward to working with you in 2023.

Thank you.