Information technology veterans tackle ‘big data’ problem in medicine

Steve McHale and Charlie Lougheed want to help medical researchers and physicians get together to make sense of burgeoning patient data, leading to innovations in health care. The two are creating Explorys Medical Inc. to develop a Google-esque technology that enables researchers and physicians to noodle questions by querying databases of medical information in real time, leading to their next discoveries.

CLEVELAND, Ohio — Steve McHale and Charlie Lougheed want to help medical researchers and physicians get together to make sense of burgeoning patient data, leading to innovations in health care.

The information technology veterans have tackled “big data” problems before. They started Solon, Ohio-based Everstream in 1999 to mine data of millions of media company subscribers. In 2005, a Georgia company acquired Everstream for about $15 million in stock.

Now, McHale and Lougheed are creating Explorys Medical Inc. to develop a Google-esque technology that enables researchers and physicians to noodle questions by querying databases of medical information in real time, leading to their next discoveries.

The technology is based on a system piloted by Dr. Anil Jain at the Cleveland Clinic, which has become an equity investor in Explorys.

“The ability to provide real-time access to clinical information should make data analysis more efficient for researchers and clinicians, potentially shortening the time associated with generating new knowledge and understanding, which will benefit both patients and physicians,” said Dr. C. Martin Harris, the Clinic’s chief information officer, in a written statement.

Jain’s prototype technology, which was developed by a team of doctors and informatics professionals, “changed the way you did the first stage of research to understand a population,” said Lougheed, president and chief technology officer for Explorys.

“Rather than knowing what you were looking for and conveying that to an IT staff,” and then waiting two or three weeks for the staff to produce a report, the Cleveland Clinic “found a way to combine different traits — medications, procedures, diagnoses, outcomes — and in seconds’ time, understand the size of that population.”

This real-time ability changed the dynamic of trolling massive amounts of medical data to pose research questions. “When things are in real time, you have a conversation with your data rather than this … echo chamber that many of us live with today in data gathering,” Lougheed said. “It’s not all that different than what Google and Yahoo and others did”  by using simple searches to organize huge amounts of information on the Internet.

“Why not scale this and apply it to medicine?” he asked.

Medicine needs such a technology. A week ago, Dr. David Rosenbaum, a MetroHealth Medical Center cardiologist and director of the system’s heart and vascular center, asked the chief executive of MetroHealth’s electronic medical record provider for a search engine to quickly find specific information. “It’s about giving doctors the tools to filter the vast information that’s there so we can better care for patients,” Rosenbaum said at the time.

The Explorys technology would enable Web-based exploration of databases of medical information contributed by network members no matter what electronic systems they use, Lougheed said. Explorys would strip patient identification from the data, enabling researchers to compare how treatment factors affected outcomes — without violating patient privacy — in ever larger populations.

Researchers on the Explorys system would have the option of sharing their data discoveries with other researchers, he said.

It will take a lot of people to create a system that mines medical data to yield meaningful research leads, Lougheed said. That’s one reason why he and McHale, who is chief executive of Explorys, are aiming to employ up to 1,000 people within seven years.

And it will take a lot of money to build the infrastructure of servers that will enable the sophisticated research technology, he said. Through their investment company 23Bell LLC, McHale, Lougheed, a few local investors and Genesis Inventions in Austin, Texas, are investing $1 million of seed money in Explorys.

McHale will concentrate on raising future investments. Both will look for state and federal grant opportunities.

McHale and Lougheed, who recently moved to a Euclid Avenue storefront in University Circle with their two employees, plan to have 10 employees by year’s end. They want to have their network up and running with some pilot customers by the middle of 2010. And they hope to launch the system by the end of next year.

“If this all works out, we’re going to have an enormous amount of data that can be used by our customers to run their businesses more effectively, understand their costs, understand how they expand care without negatively affecting the bottom line,” Lougheed said.

“If you could ask any question about your population … if we can affect that change, there are going to be a lot of ideas rolling around,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to enable.”

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