Aetna’s Clinical Policy Bulletins Available on HealthLibrarian, a Semantic Search Engine for Health Knowledge.
Florida startup integrates Aetna’s Clinical Guidelines with multi-lingual scientific, open access health content and community resources.
Miami, FL, July 30, 2009 — Aetna is the first commercial insurance company to make its clinical guidelines available through the HealthLibrarian semantic search engine for health data.
HealthLibrarian is different from traditional search engines: it does not blindly crawl the web, or present matches based on a site’s popularity. HealthLibrarian intelligently sorts and categorizes health-related information available from validated, academic, governmental and scientific sources in the so-called “Deep Web.” Users can then interactively fine-tune their query to maximize the relevance of the result set. The results presented are highly relevant and specific to the conditions or diseases of interest, and grouped by the geographical areas selected by the user. Visit http://www.HealthLibrarian.net/search to see HealthLibrarian in action now.
“Since 1999, Aetna has posted all of its clinical policy bulletins (CPBs), along with supporting citations to the clinical evidence on which they are based, on our public website,” explained James D. Cross, MD, Head, National Medical Policy and Operations at Aetna. “A great deal of scientific and clinical research goes into the development of these CPBs. Aetna’s clinical team pulls together peer-reviewed medical literature, evidence-based consensus statements, technology assessments and guidelines from professional organizations and public health agencies to use in formulating our coverage policies. Each CPB is reviewed at least annually and more often if new developments warrant. As the science evolves, so do Aetna’s clinical policies. Because we have such confidence in their integrity, we want consumers as well as physicians to have access to them. Making them searchable through HealthLibrarian will help the science reach an audience beyond Aetna’s membership providing another credible resource to help consumers and their physicians reach well informed treatment decisions.”
HealthLibrarian includes a growing number of datasources, including: Medline; FDA adverse events databases; NIH grants; Evidence-Based Medicine (“EBM”) guidelines from the UK, US: Clinical Trials; Drug Information; product label for drugs sold in the US and Spain; mental health and substance abuse providers; as well as thousands of Open Access articles.
“OpenPHI is pleased to work with Aetna to distribute its clinical guidelines to a broader, global audience. This fits with HealthLibrarian’s vision of delivering Hyper-local and Hyper-personal health information to both consumers and clinicians,” said Jose C. Lacal, Chief Vision Officer of OpenPHI. “We processed the entire contents of each CPB using our indexing and Natural Language Processing (“NLP”) technologies to allow users of HealthLibrarian to create personalized summaries of relevant information, customized for each user’s sex, age, disease of interest, and location,” Mr. Lacal concluded.
This is an example of how Aetna’s clinical guidelines will be integrated with HealthLibrarian:
- A user is navigating HealthLibrarian’s site looking for information on a particular topic (say “back pain”).
- HealthLibrarian’s semantic search engine will identify all terms and concepts related to the user’s query, using the 7 million terms in our Controlled Medical Vocabulary (“CMV”).
- Among other things, HealthLibrarian will indicate to the user that Aetna has a relevant CPB the user may be interested in looking at. HealthLibrarian will display the CPB’s title (say “Dorsal Column Stimulation” in this case).
- The CPB’s title will have embedded the URL to the actual CPB hosted at Aetna’s website
- If the user clicks on the title of the CPB, the user’s web browser will be directed to Aetna’s website for the user to read the latest version of the chosen CPB.
One note of caution: Aetna’s clinical policy bulletins provide a scientific and clinical basis on which Aetna medical directors can evaluate the status and medical necessity of emerging medical technologies and services. Individual health benefit plans will vary on what they cover based on the specific benefit design of the plan. Aetna members with questions on coverage should check with Aetna Member Services or consult with their employer’s health plan administrator to determine what is covered under their plan.
About Aetna
Aetna is one of the nation’s leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving approximately 36.8 million people with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life and disability plans, and medical management capabilities and health care management services for Medicaid plans. Our customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans, governmental units, government-sponsored plans, labor groups and expatriates. For more information, see www.aetna.com.
About HealthLibrarian
HealthLibrarian is an On-demand Data Warehouse of Global Health-related Insight. Our system integrates search, data mining, web crawling and indexing of health data from validated global sources. HealthLibrarian can be licensed for use with Health IT systems (such as Electronic Health Records), by libraries, or by government agencies.
HealthLibrarian is a service of Open Personalized Health Informatics, Corp. (“OpenPHI”), a self-funded, privately held bio-informatics startup in Miami, Florida. While some try to “improve the healthcare system,” we focus on “building a care system that improves our health.” We call that “Personalized Health.” OpenPHI simplifies the use of the vast amount of health databases, publications, and medical know-how freely available from academic and government sources across the world.