OUR APPROACH
In Making Patients Heard™, our goal is to make actionable what the patient says. We do this through innovative approaches across three key areas:
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Data collection
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Data analytics
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Clinical curation and patient validation
Data collection
We deploy online platforms and uses proprietary tools to simplify the collection of verbatim patient information about their problems, how the problems are affecting their daily functioning, treatments, and preferences.
Data analytics
From the verbatim data, we compose a standardized and informative problem list that is date-stamped and linked to the medications that patients say they are taking. We then apply systematic and intelligent data analytics to create a patient narrative that is clear, coherent and accurate. We then deploy NLP and machine learning (ML) techniques to analyze patient input about their illness and quality of life in ways that facilitate patient, clinician, and researcher use of these vital data.
Clinical curation and patient validation
Our clinical research consultants review, collectively and independently, the verbatim problems and functional consequences that patients report in order to better categorize NLP terms for the disease of interest. The clinical curation process contextualizes the verbatim reports, increases the granularity of term assignment by about 50%, and informs machine learning to develop a clinically meaningful ontology. The clinically curated and contextualized NLP output can be applied to the creation of cross-sectional and longitudinal patient-reported natural histories of disease, refinement of clinical outcome assessments (COAs), and the development of patient-reported endpoints for clinical trials.
Grey Matter has developed patient-reported outcome (PRO) tools for application to the care and research of patients affected by Parkinson and Huntington diseases. These tools can also be applied to clinical care and research of other chronic conditions, such as diabetes, asthma, arthritis, cancer, sleep disorders, hearing loss, and lung and heart disease.