Built In
Publish Date: September 9, 2022
About the company: Founded in 2015, OM1 developed its data cloud to provide advanced technological tools for researchers and support their quest to find new ways of understanding and treating chronic conditions.
Yaning Zhang, Sr. Software Engineer, shared how OM1 turns data into insight:
What problem in healthcare did your team set out to solve?
“Much of the data within the healthcare space comes in a semi-structured or unstructured format, with loads of information in various types of notes generated during patients’ encounters with providers. We wanted to supplement our structured data with this information, as it gives us a fuller picture of a patient’s medical history than what we can learn just from the more structured information. It’s an unmined treasure trove, a lot of it can be parsed out and labeled into a more structured format. This allows us to unify data out of notes with that from other sources.”
How did you innovate to solve the problem?
“We started with looking for relatively simple measures we could extract from within our unstructured data, primarily disease activity scores. Much of the note data report these scores in a somewhat standard format, or with easily-represented semantic groupings, so we built an internal set of tools for recognizing these grammars to pull out this information. From there, we’ve iterated on our internal tools to be able to explore unstructured data more efficiently and to capture a wider variety of variables, including symptoms and diagnoses. We more recently expanded our toolkit to integrate named-entity recognition (NER) as part of our pipeline to extract patient variables from unstructured text.”
In which cities are you currently hiring for tech roles in the U.S.?
“OM1’s office is headquartered in Boston and we also have remote opportunities across the U.S.”