NICE Taps Semaphore to Extract Key Insights from Metadata to Guide Healthcare Professionals
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SemaphoreChallenge
NICE required a solution which will enable them to import, create and manage taxonomies, and to use taxonomies to create and store document metadata.
Solution
Enabled to move previous taxonomy functionality and metadata stored within their CMS to Semaphore, extracting greater value from existing metadata and meeting key business objectives.
Result
NICE personnel can focus on high-value tasks to help impact the delivery of healthcare, rather than devote time to more mundane tasks like manually assigning metadata.
Full Story
Challenge
Healthcare and social care practitioners across England and Wales rely on NICE for rigorous and independent assessments of complex evidence to produce guidance and advice regarding the delivery of care. Its goal is to help practitioners get the best care to patients fast, while ensuring value to the taxpayer.
Delivering that goal requires a vast amount of research and documentation. In fact, the NICE website consists of more than 9,000 pages and many more documents and files. How that information is organized and classified is critical to its discoverability, use and reuse.
With a system in place that spans 30 taxonomies and assigns metadata to documents manually, NICE required a solution which will enable them to import, create and manage taxonomies, and to use those taxonomies to create and store document metadata.
As the amount of medical information continues to grow exponentially, Semaphore will help us to better stay focused on our goal to get the best care to people fast, while providing value to the taxpayer.
Patrick Bell
Information Architect at NICE
Solution
NICE chose Semaphore for its suite of APIs that provide easy integration with existing systems enabling NICE to move previous taxonomy functionality and metadata stored within their CMS to Semaphore, extracting greater value from existing metadata and meeting key business objectives.
Thanks to Semaphore, seamless integration of content with external systems led to faster feedback cycles. NICE leveraged this real-time access to customer outcomes to continuously improve, signifying the company’s commitment to evolving to deliver the highest quality information to care organizations.
Thanks to a technology landscape spanning a broad array of platforms, Semaphore provides NICE with the multi-platform flexibility it requires.
Some of the benefits of Semaphore that NICE is taking advantage of include:
- Move taxonomy functionality and metadata previously stored within the CMS to Semaphore.
- Leverage Semaphore to speed up customer feedback cycles and deliver the most up to date guidance to care organizations.
- Seamlessly integrate Semaphore with existing health systems to build a new metadata repository.
Result
The implementation of Semaphore is timely for NICE, as NICE is working on a transformation strategy to continuously evolve to keep pace with the changing needs of the healthcare system. With rapidly evolving digital health technologies and evidence-based healthcare, the amount of healthcare data is growing exponentially as the healthcare system faces workforce and capacity pressures.
With Semaphore in place, NICE personnel can focus on high-value tasks to help impact the delivery of healthcare, rather than devote time to more mundane tasks like manually assigning metadata. That capability will become more critical as NICE prepares to import new taxonomies, including MeSH, a hierarchically organized vocabulary produced by the National Library of Medicine, taxonomies from the World Health Organization and SNOMED CT, one of the world’s most comprehensive clinical terminology database with more than 300,000 concepts.
“As the amount of medical information continues to grow exponentially, Semaphore will help us to better stay focused on our goal to get the best care to people fast, while providing value to the taxpayer,” said Patrick Bell, Information Architect at NICE.
Additionally, Semaphore’s ability to automatically reclassify documents without manual intervention is another feature NICE plans to explore to keep pace with changes in healthcare requirements and regulations, allowing metadata to be more consistently applied to documents versus manual approaches and ultimately improving use, reuse and repurposing of data.
Healthcare professionals trust us to provide the highest quality information available. With Semaphore, feedback cycles are faster than ever before. It allows us to continuously improve the guidance we give in real-time, enabling patients to have quick access to the best care.
Patrick Bell
Information Architect at NICE