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Below is our recent interview with Dr. Anitha Rao, Founder & CEO at Neurocern:
Q: Could you provide our readers with a brief introduction to your company?
A: Neurocern is a minority female physician founded and veteran-owned company. Our proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) and neuroinformatics platform leverages data from multiple sources — including electronic health records, prescription data, and insurance claims data — to help insurers, health systems, and life sciences organizations find actionable clinical and financial insights hiding in their existing data.
Q: Any highlights on your recent announcement?
A: Timing is everything, and just this year alone, we have seen a dramatic increase in emerging disease modifying treatments for Alzheimer’s disease. These new treatments require specialists to evaluate and diagnose patients, however there is a significant clinical shortage of geriatric and neurologist specialists globally. This clinical gap has resulted in a high rate of misdiagnosis and delays in care.
Advances in technology and artificial intelligence, like Neurocern, use innovative analytical modeling that emulates the decision making of a human expert. So for example, AI can mine structured data inputs and flag patients to appropriate lab testing and imaging required for insurance benefits.
By applying Neurocern’s AI engine to insurance claims and population health data, this peer reviewed study demonstrated that AI was able to identify eligible patients for new treatments for Alzheimer’s more accurately than a general primary care clinician, thereby reducing the risk of side effects on the wrong patient and getting better clinical outcomes for the patient, a triage process that would save insurers and consumers more than $370M in drug costs over five years.
These findings were replicated in a real-world pilot with large Fortune 500 insurance carriers and presented at the Alzheimer’s Association International Conference.
Q: Can you give us more insights into your offering?
A: Driven by an expert system and deep learning protocols, our modular APIs combine prescription, claims, lab, and other data sources to enrich and create new proprietary clinical insights. Our platform uses predictive and prescriptive analytics to:
- Create patient cohorts, find undiagnosed neurological conditions, predict cost of care, and identify appropriate interventions
- Identify and flag patients most likely to be eligible for disease modifying therapies and route them to appropriate screening
- Improve organizational workflows with customized clinical decision support tools
- Track patient outcomes over time, deriving relevant health and pharmacoeconomic statistics
Q: What can we expect from your company in the next 6 months? What are your plans?
A: Our plans are to grow our product portfolio for payers and life sciences, and expand into other diseases such as stroke and Parkinson’s disease.
Q: What is the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: Our AI-expert engine is built on evidence-based research and standards in neurological care. Unlike traditional analytics companies that just provide one derivative of analytics (for example, describing what is already in your data), Neurocern’s proprietary AI engine uses multivariate data modeling and multiple levels of analytics to go beyond the “now” and truly predict future costs and outcomes (predictive and prescriptive analytics).
Our technology sits right at the intersection of health systems, payers, and life sciences organizations; our approach leverages data to create win-win-win scenarios for every aspect of the healthcare delivery system, ultimately leading to better outcomes for everyone, including patients.
