Case Study: CogStack improves patient outcomes and reduces clinical risk with Elastic

Unlocking valuable healthcare data to improve patient outcomes and reduce clinical risk

CogStack, used by leading U.K. hospitals including King’s College Hospital and Guy’s and St Thomas’, faced the challenge of extracting meaningful information from vast, fragmented electronic health records and unstructured clinical text. During Covid-19, for example, inconsistent naming in patient records made it difficult to track cases, symptoms, and treatments. Elastic’s Elasticsearch and Language AI were used as part of the CogStack platform to help clinicians search records more effectively and make faster decisions.

Elastic helped CogStack scale from early proofs of concept to a hospital-wide solution with real-time search, NLP, and Kibana dashboards, supported by Elastic consultants. The results included faster public health response, improved trial recruitment, better service planning, and safer care alerts; in one major medication safety case, CogStack and Elastic identified thousands of at-risk women in one afternoon, a task that previously could have taken months or years. Across core sites, the platform has processed more than 200 million clinical documents, reducing clinical risk and improving patient outcomes.

CogStack

James Teo

Clinical Director of AI and Data