Electronic health records (EHRs) modernized healthcare documentation, but they weren’t designed with drug discovery, pharmacovigilance, or market access in mind. Their widespread adoption in the U.S. followed the HITECH Act of 2009, which incentivized digitization to support billing and compliance, not research. For life sciences, that design legacy means critical insights remain obscured.
IMO Health intends to change that. By normalizing and enriching EHR data, we help pharma, clinical research organizations (CROs), and HEOR teams uncover the precision insights needed to advance therapies and demonstrate value.
Built for billing, not for science
EHRs emerged from billing systems, evolving around structured coding schemes like ICD-10-CM and Current Procedural Terminology (CPT®). These codes enable reimbursement but flatten nuance. A record might simply note “asthma,” leaving out triggers, severity, or treatment response, details vital for safety monitoring or drug development.
This reduces real-world clinical stories to administrative snapshots.
What life sciences need and what EHRs deliver
Pharma and research organizations require fidelity: outcomes in real-world settings, adverse event details, therapy response patterns, and comorbidity profiles. Yet EHR data tends to divide into two imperfect categories:
- Structured fields, which are easy to aggregate but often oversimplified.
- Unstructured narratives, which hold rich clinical context but are inconsistent and difficult to mine at scale.
Consider diabetes: a structured field may log “Type 2 Diabetes,” but only narrative notes reveal “patient reports hypoglycemia after starting semaglutide.” That’s the kind of insight pharmacovigilance teams need to flag, yet it’s buried in text.
Without careful normalization, these mismatches risk underestimating safety signals, misclassifying outcomes, and overlooking the real patient experience.
The double-edged sword of clinical data
Structured and unstructured data each bring value – and limitations. Structured codes standardize information but rarely capture nuance, such as distinguishing between HER2-positive metastatic breast cancer and a localized tumor. On the other hand, unstructured notes capture exactly that kind of detail, but their variability makes them nearly impossible to use without robust terminology.
Identifying eligible patients for a trial, tracking real-world drug tolerability, or differentiating between a mild rash and a life-threatening reaction all require more granularity than billing codes can provide.
The IMO Health difference
Clinicians built IMO Health’s clinical terminology to reflect how care is documented at the point of care. We normalize inconsistent inputs into clinically meaningful concepts by bridging structured and unstructured data. This enables life science teams to:
- Detect safety signals earlier by translating free-text notes into structured pharmacovigilance data.
- Identify precise patient cohorts for trial feasibility and HEOR studies.
- Enrich outcomes research with accurate distinctions across subtypes, complications, and response patterns.
Instead of one broad category, IMO Health differentiates hundreds of clinically meaningful concepts – Type 1, Type 2, gestational, with and without complications – ensuring that studies reflect reality, not approximations.
Bridging the divide between codes and care
EHR systems were designed to capture billable events, not the complex clinical realities that drive science forward. The gap between billing codes and clinical nuance can obscure signals, misrepresent outcomes, and weaken payer models.
At IMO Health, we close that gap. By normalizing messy, heterogeneous data into clinically precise concepts, we help life sciences teams see what billing codes miss. The result is evidence you can trust – whether for pharmacovigilance, trial design, or market access.
