Cognitive Medical Systems Launches CORA, Its First Product

Cognitive Medical Systems, a specialist in standards-based Clinical Decision Support (CDS) software and healthcare IT infrastructure, announced today that it is piloting its flagship product, Clinical Optimization and Reasoning Architecture (CORA), with two major U.S. healthcare delivery systems. The platform gives hospitals the ability to easily define, deploy and sustain improved evidence-based clinical practices.

“The demands being placed on hospitals and clinicians today are tremendous. Not only are therapeutic and care coordination requirements increasingly more complex, but workflows are being progressively constrained by regulatory or administrative mandates,” said Emory Fry, MD, CEO of Cognitive Medical Systems. “Additionally, patients are more informed than ever – they increasingly expect their care to be both compliant with the very latest clinical evidence and tailored to their specific needs and preferences. Even the most progressive hospitals and clinicians struggle to keep up with the exponential growth of new clinical knowledge.”

Fry continued “Fortunately, many of the resources needed to meet these demands are becoming more available. Hospital information systems, which store vast troves of valuable patient information in their electronic medical records, are increasingly able to expose that data in ways that can be leveraged by advanced analytics and orchestration services. Our platform enables our customers to optimize both decision-making and clinical workflows in ways previously unimaginable. We believe it has unique potential to improve quality, ensure regulatory compliance, and provide individualized care.”

CORA is designed to be layered upon legacy health information systems in order to provide real-time monitoring, process orchestration, and analytic services that existing infrastructure typically lack.  CORA also enables organizations to represent their workflow optimized, evidence-based practice guidelines to be authored as computable clinical pathways. These algorithms allow CORA to monitor patient data and administrative processes in real-time, make prospective care recommendations, and rapidly detect omissions in care while there is still time to mitigate the resultant risk.  The system communicates its analytic findings and recommendations to providers and patients in a variety of configurable, workflow-sensitive ways.

Finally, CORA is an open, standards-based architecture delivering Health Level Seven International (HL7) compliant services, data models and semantics. Organizations deploying the platform are protected from vendor lock in and are afforded unique opportunities for data and process interoperability. Cognitive Medical Systems is also a leader in a national effort to develop sharable algorithms compliant with the HL7 Knowledge Artifact Specification. When commercially available, CORA will provide facilities for compliant algorithms to be sourced from third parties, imported, and then deployed within the organization. Such functionality should enable small or rural providers without the clinical or technical resources to develop their own algorithms to still benefit from computable knowledge authored by commercial content providers or academic centers of excellence. Cognitive is committed to ensuring that CORA can take advantage of interoperable third-party content promising to reduce the cost of deploying computable clinical knowledge, accelerate the adoption of new clinical innovations, and improve clinical quality.

“Hospitals have yet to see major ROI from their implementations of costly electronic medical records. In many cases, different IT solutions were chosen for different needs, each system storing information in proprietary formats that put little emphasis on interoperability or the secondary use of data for research or analysis. CORA data services provide the aggregation and normalization needed to unlock the power of this information,” said Shannon O’Brien, Director of Product Management for Cognitive Medical Systems. “As data streams into CORA from heterogeneous sources, it passes through a transformation layer and is converted into a single, canonical data model to feed its algorithms in real-time. The system allows for the aggregation of a comprehensive corpus of patient data that can then be processed by a variety of reasoning technologies selected to provide optimal analysis.”

CORA is expected to be generally available by mid 2018. More information about the platform is available at http://cognitivemedicalsystems.com/products/.