The American Cancer Society and Layer Health to Accelerate Data Abstraction for Cancer Research

New Collaboration Leverages AI-Powered Platform to Enhance Clinical Data Insights for Cancer Research

Boston, MA — Layer Health, a leader in artificial intelligence (AI)-driven healthcare technology, today announced a multi-year collaboration with the American Cancer Society (ACS) that will use large language models (LLM) to accelerate cancer research.

Traditionally, gathering information from patient medical records for research is a labor-intensive, time-consuming process that relies heavily on manual effort. Prior machine-learning approaches were not scalable and did not generalize well across records from different hospital systems.

ACS will now use Layer Health’s innovative LLM-powered data abstraction platform to extract clinical data from thousands of medical charts of patients enrolled in ACS research studies, including the landmark Cancer Prevention Study-3, a population study of 300,000 participants among whom several thousand have been diagnosed with cancer and provided medical records.

Layer Health's platform will provide accurate, reliable, high-quality data in less time, improving the efficiency of cancer research, and enabling ACS to uncover deeper insights from medical records in their quest to improve patient outcomes.

Layer Health’s AI platform is designed specifically for healthcare to reason over an entire patients’ longitudinal medical record and answer complex clinical questions, using an evidence-based approach that justifies every answer with direct quotes from the chart. This strategy prioritizes transparency and explainability and eliminates the problem of “hallucination” that is sometimes seen with other LLMs.

“We are excited to work with Layer Health to streamline and scale our data abstraction process,” said Dr. Alpa Patel, Senior Vice President of Population Science, American Cancer Society. “This collaboration will help us accelerate our research and generate more meaningful insights that can drive progress in the fight against cancer.”

The new collaboration builds on a successful pilot involving breast cancer patients. With Layer Health’s platform, ACS was able to pull complex concepts from patient charts with an accuracy of 95-100% on all pilot variables, beating human performance.

Layer Health’s platform is designed with security, compliance, and auditability at its core, being both HIPAA-compliant and SOC II Type 2 certified, ensuring that patient data is handled with the highest levels of privacy and security.

“This collaboration with the American Cancer Society marks a significant milestone in how technology can support the fight against cancer,” said Dr. David Sontag, Co-founder and CEO of Layer Health. “We are proud to provide a solution that not only streamlines the research process but also empowers organizations like the ACS to scale their insights and accelerate their groundbreaking work.”

About Layer Health

Layer Health is a cutting-edge healthcare AI company that harnesses the power of large language models (LLMs) to transform data abstraction and unlock high-value insights from structured and unstructured EHR data. Founded by AI and clinical leaders from some of the most prestigious academic and healthcare organizations, the company is building a next-generation AI platform to help its partners improve clinical care, streamline operations and financial performance. For more information visit layerhealth.com or follow us on LinkedIn.