Amplity Insights

The Amplity Insights database provides unstructured health records generated from provider notes as transcribed from verbal to written form. Health care encounters included initial office consultations, follow-up visits, urgent care visits, emergency department and hospital admissions and discharges, postoperative consultations, office notes, and referral letters. The most frequent provider types represented in the database were “multispecialty” (defined as a combination of emergency department or urgent care and specialists in hospital networks) and general practitioner, internal medicine, or family medicine. Endocrinologists represented a small number of the providers. After the patient visit, the provider dictated the details of the encounter, including the patient’s medical history, family history, exam, prescription information, and plan for treatment. A transcription company then processed the dictated notes and sent the transcription to the provider’s office for final approval. Amplity Insights collects these transcripts in their database, deidentifies patient data, then analyzes these texts using NLP to identify patient encounters that mentioned keywords or concepts of interest (see Appendix 1). Data were then aggregated to the patient level to provide quantitative data about the study cohort.

The Amplity Insights database contains records on more than 15 million patient-lives from all 50 states representing more than 150,000 unique providers. Males are slightly underrepresented each year compared with national estimates (~45% Amplity Insights vs ~49% national estimates). The proportion of African-Americans in the Amplity Insights database is similar to the proportion reported by nationally representative data sources (~13% Amplity Insights vs ~16% national estimates). However, Caucasians are overrepresented compared with national estimates (~80% Amplity Insights vs 62% national estimates); Hispanics and those in the “Other” race/ethnicity category are underrepresented. Age is skewed older in the Amplity Insights database vs federal data sources (~70% ≥45 years of age in Amplity Insights vs ~60% ≥45 years of age in the various nationally representative data sets). When compared with federal sources of demographics such as the National Health Interview Survey, the proportion of patients from the South in the US in the Amplity Insights database is close to nationally representative estimates (~34% vs ~36%); however, the Northeast and Midwest are slightly overrepresented (~22% vs ~18% and ~30% vs ~22%, respectively), and the West is underrepresented (~14% vs ~23%).7