Mendel Team
May 3, 2023

How a diagnostic company was able to build a clinico-genomic database in a week

Introduction

The customer, a key player in the genomics space, had a strategic initiative to build a clinic genomic database to support their life sciences customers.

The Problem

The customer’s problem came down to time and scale. They had a list of 60k patients and were looking for 120 variables. Their team of 4 abstractors took 1.5 hours per patient and abstracted between 200 to 400 patients a month. They wanted to be able to scale their abstraction efforts and move faster, increasing the team’s productivity.

Solution

Mendel helped the customer scale their abstraction efforts. The team leveraged Mendel’s proprietary AI pipeline and abstraction workspace to index their unstructured data and extract key clinical attributes such as Cancer Diagnosis, Staging, Metastasis, Date of Diagnosis, Biomarkers, Surgeries, Diagnostic Procedures, Outcomes, and Response.

Results

By partnering with Mendel, the diagnostics company was able to process 60,000 patient records in 8 days. Without Mendel, this would have taken them approximately 5 years with a team of 4 abstractors.

The variables that caused difficulty were concepts like surgery, outcome, and response. In these cases, a human abstractor stepped in and leveraged targeted abstraction. The Human + AI approach exceeded the quality of a human only approach for every variable we studied. This is not surprising, since leveraging the AI output gives the human abstractor a significant advantage–making abstraction teams more efficient.

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