Apixio's 19M Series D funding fuels cognitive computing in health care

Doctors have largely moved on from keeping illegible, handwritten notes about their patients to maintaining electronic health records, thanks in part to new government rules and subsidies. Those records, of course, comprise a vast trove of information that could unlock the potential of data-driven medicine, leading to more effective and efficient health care. That kind of advancement in medicine is sorely needed -- medical error is, after all, the third leading cause of death in the United States. But so far, the potential of data-driven medicine has gone largely unrealized because around 80 percent of health care data is unstructured. The six-year-old San Francisco company Apixio is now tapping into that unstructured data with a cognitive computing platform called Iris, which uses data mining, pattern recognition and natural language processing to make sense of your doctor's notes.