Press Releases

NEW YORK, NY, US - Apr 25, 2019 - Elsevier, the information analytics business specializing in science and health, and phactMI, a non-profit collaboration of pharmaceutical company Medical Information (MI) leaders, will develop a new semantic search portal designed to provide healthcare professionals with scientifically accurate, up-to-date and unbiased information.

The solution, built on Elsevier’s Entellect life sciences platform and due to launch in Q4 2019, will enable users to quickly access the latest approved medical documentation from 30 major pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as relevant information from the FDA, such as standard product labels.

“Our mission is to provide healthcare professionals with the most accurate, unbiased and relevant information possible, to ensure the safe, appropriate use of these products and improve overall patient care,” said Patrick Reilly, CEO of phactMI. “Healthcare professionals need to have immediate access to the right information, at the right time, to make the right decision regarding their patients’ care. There’s an urgent need for easy-to-access, reliable information, that is provided in an easy-to-navigate format.

“We chose to partner with Elsevier because of its heritage and technical expertise in search and taxonomy. The Elsevier team understood the problem we were facing and how Entellect could help solve it.”

The portal will allow users to search by relevant medical information, so that healthcare professionals will be able to access the most current and accurate information without having to consult multiple sources. The solution intends to provide easy access to the most relevant and current medical information.

“Digital transformation is changing healthcare at an unprecedented pace and opening up new paths to better patient care through data,” said Tim Hoctor, VP of Professional Services, Elsevier. “However, if doctors are going to rely on that data, they have to know they can trust it. We designed Entellect to be a safe and trustworthy platform, and by building the phactMI search application on top, users will be able to get quick answers to their queries, as well as find contact information for manufacturer medical information departments.

“Our experience in managing data and taxonomies has gone into Entellect. We designed it to filter out promotional materials so users know that the information they are reading is unbiased and can, therefore, treat patients with greater confidence.”

Entellect was designed to draw in scientific and medical data from disparate sources, including internal and external siloes, websites, laboratory information management systems (LIMS), archives and applications, and collate and re-format that information into a consistent and normalized format. So, even if information from two companies is presented differently, Entellect can gather and normalize it so that it is comparable for users. The platform’s semantic search functionality improves the relevancy of results, returning information relevant to the search term.