Prior Knowledge, a startup firm that seeks to enable entrepreneurs to access and analyze data sets, announce that it is teaming with Practice Fusion's Research Division to explore new ways of interpreting health data.
Prior Knowledge aims to empower what it calls "non-data scientists," such as entrepreneurs and app developers, to uncover previously unseen relationships and find insights in data regardless of their math skills, officials say.
By deploying Veritable, its predictive database, Prior Knowledge officials hope the pilot will uncover new health trends using Practice Fusion's de-identified data set, which is said to cover the largest physician-patient community in the country.
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"We're working toward the same goal of democratizing information," said Ryan Howard, CEO of Practice Fusion. "Practice Fusion is unlocking health information technology for doctors and patients while Prior Knowledge is unlocking data for entrepreneurs and researchers."
Prior Knowledge was formed in August 2011 by a team of MIT graduates. Veritable, its flagship predictive database technology, helps individuals and organizations to understand their data and make state-of-the-art analyses and predictions without needing a statistics background
Analyzing the underlying structure of datasets and seeking to reveal new insights that would be difficult or impossible to discover with traditional data science techniques, the database is available through the cloud-based REST API, a type of Web service API that facilitates easier integration for developers.
Through its partnership with the Practice Fusion Research Division, the startup hopes to identify public health trends using one of the largest clinical datasets in the country.
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"As the largest physician-patient community in the U.S., Practice Fusion is an ideal partner," said Eric Jonas, CEO of Prior Knowledge. "Our unique technology lets us rapidly extract the most valuable relationships in the data in order to solve the right problems. And Practice Fusion has the right data – one of the largest clinical datasets in the country, with profound potential for revealing new health insights."
