Ciox Health Acquires Biomedical Natural Language Processing Pioneer, Medal, Inc.

Strategic Acquisition to Bolster Real World Data Business

ALPHARETTA, Ga. – July 28, 2020 – Ciox Health, a leading health technology company, today announced its acquisition of San Francisco-based biomedical Natural Language Processing (biomed-NLP) technology company, Medal, Inc., a leader in the application of AI techniques to the interrogation of unstructured medical record data. The acquisition accelerates capabilities to enable Real World Data (RWD) in support of research that advances patient care.

“We’re proud to bolster the Ciox Real World Data offering with Medal’s technology and team,” says Pete McCabe, CEO, Ciox. “The team and the biomed-NLP product, combined with Ciox’s technology-enabled ability to create longitudinal records across EHRs and provider systems, remove the friction related to medical records-based clinical research.  We will consistently supply consented, HIPAA-compliant, de-identified, research-grade RWD for complex clinical use cases to commercial researchers in pharma and biotech, as well as government-sponsored researchers. The need is particularly highlighted in the COVID-19 research questions being asked by agencies like the FDA, CDC and NIH.”

As more pharmaceutical and research organizations look to Real World Data to accelerate clinical research, reliable identification and interpretation of phenotypic data from deep inside medical records are becoming paramount. The most relevant information resides in the unstructured data: the surgical reports, pathology reports, imaging reports, discharge summaries and other clinician-scribed narrative text. Medal’s software helps identify, contextualize, and interpret narrative-based medical notes, leading to the creation of research-grade data sets at scale. The company’s approach to biomed-NLP and deep learning AI is guided and informed by consensus from clinical expert reviewers across therapeutic areas.

For employees of Medal, the transition is a natural step in the evolution of the company’s biomedical NLP efforts.

“More than 100 million medical records are retrieved and reviewed by Ciox each year from the vast majority of U.S. providers, presenting an unprecedented opportunity to actually bring a true longitudinal perspective to clinical investigation. Ciox works at the first and last mile of U.S. healthcare data,” says Andy McMurry, Ph.D., Chief Science Officer of Medal. “Using Medal AI, Ciox will reduce human expert time and increase the utility of patient data to support biomedical discovery and clinical trials research across many disease areas, including COVID-19. Combining vast biomedical knowledge sources with clinically trained Artificial Intelligence enabling human experts, we are reinventing Real World Data for clinical investigation.”

This acquisition is the third major recent announcement from Ciox’s growing Real World Data business, following two prior announcements of strategic collaborations with LabCorp and Merck. As health data remains fragmented throughout the U.S. healthcare ecosystem, Ciox is attracting interest in its RWD division from medical research organizations and other partners. This additional feature of the Ciox DataFit Platform^TM through the acquisition of Medal will enable faster and more consistent translational research.