Structuring Medical Text with Tim O'Connell from Emtelligent

What if AI could unlock the potential of healthcare’s vast, unstructured data? In this episode, Tim O'Connell, Co-Founder and CEO of Emtelligent, explains how his company is bridging the gap between messy medical data and usable insights with AI-powered solutions. Drawing from his background in both engineering and radiology, Tim discusses how he saw firsthand the inefficiencies caused by disorganized medical notes and reports, which led to the creation of Emtelligent. He breaks down how their AI models work to process and structure this data, making it usable for healthcare professionals, researchers, and beyond. Tim also dives into the technical challenges, from handling faxed medical records to ensuring high levels of precision and recall in model training. Beyond the technology, he emphasizes the importance of safety, ethical use, and how Emtelligent continues to adapt its AI to meet the evolving needs of the healthcare industry, helping to make patient care more efficient and accurate. Don’t miss out on this important conversation with Tim O’Connell from Emtelligent!

Key Points:

• An overview of Tim’s background in engineering and radiology.
• How Tim co-founded Emtelligent to solve pressing data issues in healthcare.
• The importance of turning unstructured medical text into searchable, structured data.
• How Emtelligent’s models extract metadata and structure from faxed patient records.
• Why healthcare data is so challenging to work with, from shorthand to messy notes.
• The role of precision and recall in assessing and improving model performance in healthcare.
• Ensuring AI models continue to perform well after deployment with ongoing updates.
• How Tim’s team maintains safety and ethical standards in AI healthcare solutions.
• Creating technology that serves the end user; how it is informed by firsthand experience.
• The importance of clinical input to develop relevant and practical AI healthcare tools.
• Where Tim sees AI's impact in healthcare evolving over the next three to five years.

Quotes:

“During that year [that I was] working in the hospital, – I saw so many problems that we have in the healthcare environment and realized that quite a few of them had to do with the fact [that] we deal with so much unstructured data.” — Tim O’Connell

“Every time a human goes to see a caregiver, some kind of an unstructured text note is generated – We really can't use a lot of that data, unless it's another human who's reading that data.” — Tim O’Connell

“I’m still a practicing radiologist. – It’s not just a matter of intelligent people coming up with good ideas and going, ‘Oh, well. [Let’s throw this] against the wall and see what sticks’. We're developing solutions that are applicable in today's healthcare environment.” — Tim O’Connell

Links:

Tim O’Connell on LinkedIn

Emtelligent

Resources for Computer Vision Teams:

LinkedIn – Connect with Heather.

Computer Vision Insights Newsletter – A biweekly newsletter to help bring the latest machine learning and computer vision research to applications in people and planetary health.

Computer Vision Strategy Session – Not sure how to advance your computer vision project? Get unstuck with a clear set of next steps. Schedule a 1 hour strategy session now to advance your project.