COTA partners with Google Cloud to transform cancer care

New partnership focused on bring clarity to unstructured oncology data with the latest advances in machine learning and natural language processing

NEW YORK, November 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ — COTA, Inc. , a real-world oncology data and analytics company, announced a new partnership with Google Cloud to develop algorithms that will extract and make sense of unstructured data from electronic health records (EHRs). Companies will apply machine learning and natural language processing to organize text fields such as clinician notes, turning them into structured fields that can be used for research and analysis.

The EHR has revolutionized the way healthcare providers capture data, but the challenges of transforming raw, unstructured healthcare data into real-world data fit for purpose remains a huge challenge today. Together, COTA and Google Cloud are entering into a technology partnership to meet this challenge head-on, with the goal of fueling a new era of transformative innovation in oncology research and the treatment of cancer patients.

While the vast majority of critical health data is now created and stored digitally, much of the information is still generated in an unstructured format. Free-text clinical notes and PDF documents remain largely invisible to algorithms that can mine structured data fields to gain key patient care insights. As a result, clinicians and researchers may be unable to generate a complete picture of the patient journey and may miss opportunities to advance standard of care and treatment options.

“Imagine a scenario where we can be alerted, in real time, to new diseases or receive signals from geographic areas where patients are experiencing better outcomes, or worse outcomes, so we can act quickly,” said Miruna SasuPresident and CEO of COTA, Inc. “To make this our reality, we must leverage technologies to ingest health data responsibly, accurately, and quickly. We are excited to partner with Google Cloud to combine our respective strengths in technology and data science with the ultimate goal of improving patient care.”

The story continues

Today, many large real-world data companies, including COTA, leverage clinicians to manually organize real-world oncology data. While this is a reliable and reliable short-term solution to overcoming the challenges associated with abstracting and curating unstructured oncology data, scaling up this approach on vast amounts of data is both time-consuming and resource-intensive.

In collaboration with Google Cloud, COTA will seek to augment manual human-led abstraction with technology-driven abstraction and curation best practices. This approach will, over time, provide access to even more advanced data elements that can be buried in unstructured notes. For example, next-generation genomic sequencing is becoming particularly important for personalizing cancer care. However, the reports providers receive from genetic testing labs are often in PDF format. Traditional tools such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR) cannot accurately “read” the text of these PDF images, so this data often goes unused today.

“We are collaborating with COTA to build a series of novel natural language processing models tailored specifically to unstructured oncology data, including emerging data such as genomic sequencing,” said Shweta Maniar, Director of Solutions for the Life Sciences Industry at Google Cloud. “By training these algorithms specifically on oncology information, we will partner with COTA to generate a much more comprehensive understanding of what is happening in cancer care and how a patient’s unique clinical history may have an impact on their response to treatment.

For more information on COTA and Google Cloud’s efforts to help providers and researchers power the next generation of evidence-based oncology treatments and cancer care with real-world oncology data fit for purpose, please consult our Blog .

About COTA, Inc.

Founded by oncologists, COTA is committed to creating an accurate, patient-centered approach to cancer care through the use of real-world data. The company leverages technology-enabled human data abstraction methods to make sense of complex and fragmented real-world patient data. Offering the highest quality, real-life oncology data from leading academic and community cancer centers and an advanced analytics platform, COTA partners with life science companies, providers and payers. leading life to ensure that anyone affected by cancer has a clear path to the right care. To learn more about COTA and how to accelerate improvements in cancer care and treatment with comprehensive and diverse real-world data and analytics, visit cotahealthcare.com .

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SOURCECOTA, Inc.