John Snow Labs Launches World’s Fastest NLP Library, Helping Healthcare Organizations Improve Patient Care With AI

Avatar
By Sam Brake Guia February 21, 2018

John Snow Labs, an award-winning global data operations company, today announces the launch of its healthcare-specific deep learning models for natural language processing (NLP). The models allow developers to build software applications that understand the nuances of medical texts, and guide healthcare professionals in understanding and reacting to patient needs with unparalleled speed and accuracy.

The new NLP library enables healthcare providers to quickly process and interpret a wide range of clinical texts, including patient notes, lab reports, clinical trial results, medical research, and chatbot and clinical discussions. Doctors and other healthcare professionals can then use the resulting analysis to identify patients at risk, match patients to clinical trials, alert caregivers about patient safety, make clinical recommendations or automate clinical coding and billing.

Data scientists in the healthcare industry can access and seamlessly deploy the new models within John Snow Labs’ open source NLP Library for Apache Spark, which has set new speed benchmarks by training a custom part-of-speech tagger 80 times faster than on spaCy, an industrial-grade NLP library that’s widely considered as the fastest so far. Healthcare organizations can license the new models with an annual subscription, which includes access to regular updates with the latest biomedical research and terminology, as well as expert support.

The market for artificial intelligence in healthcare is projected to grow by more than 52% CAGR between 2017 and 2022, and exceed $10B by 2024. Many of these solutions, from chatbots and mental health diagnostics to hospital management and drug discovery, rely on information that is locked in free-text documents. The newly launched models enable solution developers to unlock them at speed, scale, accuracy and productivity that was never available before.

Using John Snow Labs’ core open source NLP library, in addition to its new healthcare-specific models, Kaiser Permanente is currently working to better forecast demand for hospital beds and ensure that enough nurses are available to take care of incoming patients at one of its hospitals. On March 7 at the upcoming Strata Data Conference in San Jose, CA, Kaiser Permanente Product Leader Santosh Kulkarni will discuss this in further detail, and members of the John Snow Labs team will be present to answer questions about the new technology.

Saif Addin Ellafi

Saif Addin Ellafi

“We’re excited to provide new state of the art models that will accelerate many healthcare AI projects. Training domain-specific NLP models is hard, and teams often compromise because they don’t have the skills or the time. Now the most advanced research is productized and easily available out of the box,” said Saif Addin Ellafi, John Snow Labs Product Manager.

John Snow Labs is aiming to democratize data science for organizations across many industries, but has prioritized the healthcare industry in particular. In doing so, it hopes to help healthcare organizations strengthen and improve their offerings by providing them with all the data and information they need to help save lives and improve health on a global scale.