SEMCARE · Semantic Data Platform for Healthcare

The aim of SEMCARE is to build a semantic data platform to support clinical trials. The platform will identify patient cohorts based on patient-level criteria (e.g. age, gender, diagnosis, indication, symptoms, lab results) scattered in heterogeneous clinical data. As most of patient-level data is unstructured, language technologies are necessary to extract and exploit the relevant data. Our platform combines the power of full text search with text analytics and semantic web technologies for a hybrid semantic full-text search. It will enable semantic integration of different data sources for information extraction, document retrieval, analytics and visualization.<br/>SEMCARE addresses the ever growing need to exploit medical data from clinical trials and for monitoring and improving healthcare delivery. The platform has the potential to provide for a more efficient, scalable method of patient recruitment for clinical trials; up to 80% of clinical trials fail to meet their patient enrolment quotas on time and SEMCARE will help prevent this. Recruitment delay currently causes up to $8 million per day in loss of revenue for the biopharmaceutical industry. The platform will also be capable to detect undiagnosed patients with rare diseases based on sign and symptom combinations. This has the potential to speed up the research on this group of diseases, which constitute a highly attractive market for pharmaceutical companies, up to 300,000 USD drug revenue per year and patient.<br/>The SEMCARE consortium includes passionate players from the demand and supply sides. Hospitals in three different European countries serve as pilot sites and have particular interests in applying SEMCARE in their clinical research activities. The SMEs AVERBIS and SYNAPSE have a clear interest in the exploitation of the results. Regarding commercialization, a pharmaceutical partner network that has a genuine interest in supporting the dissemination of our results will be established.