CogStack is pleased to share that Barts Charity has awarded funding to Professor Rui Providência for a two-year project, CLARITY: Clinical Language Analysis for coding, Research recruitment and Improvement in Treatment Yield.
CLARITY will trial CogStack’s natural language processing (NLP) capabilities at St Bartholomew’s Health NHS Foundation Trust (Barts) Heart Centre, turning clinically important information from unstructured notes and letters into searchable, analysable data that can directly support care, operations and research.
Barts Charity is the dedicated charity for Barts Health NHS Trust, supporting St Bartholomew’s, The Royal London, Newham, Whipps Cross and Mile End hospitals and funding innovation and medical research that can improve health in East London and beyond.
The CLARITY programme will focus on practical, high-impact outcomes: increasing the number and completeness of coded diagnoses and procedures per patient by extracting concepts from free text; identifying patients who may be eligible for evidence-based treatments but haven’t yet been offered them (initially focusing on atrial fibrillation anticoagulation and key therapy gaps in heart failure with reduced left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), including device eligibility); and quantifying how richer, NLP-augmented coding could affect complexity measurement and reimbursement over time. In parallel, the team will develop more detailed post-coordinated expressions for cardiovascular conditions and procedures to support more precise research recruitment, accelerate enrolment into ongoing studies and trials (including BRITISH), and enable hospital-wide EHR association studies to detect site and ethnicity-linked treatment disparities.
CLARITY also aims to create a comprehensive dataset from unstructured content not yet represented within existing data assets—supporting approved audit and research, enhancing the Barts BioResource through additional diagnoses, and enabling collaborators to run further operational use cases such as hospital-acquired Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) monitoring and identifying “missed intentions” (planned appointments, investigations or procedures that were not booked or requested).
Professor Providência is Consultant Cardiologist and Electrophysiologist at St Bartholomew’s Hospital (Barts Heart Centre) and Professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology and Evidence Synthesis at University College London (UCL). A multidisciplinary group will lead the different workstreams, spanning electrophysiology and heart failure, ethnic disparities, VTE monitoring, missed intentions, clinical coding and reimbursement, post-coordination, and recruitment into cardiovascular research.
Professor Rui Providência (Barts Heart Centre / UCL) said: “I’m incredibly proud that Barts Charity is backing CLARITY. This project is about making better use of information that already exists in the clinical record—so we can code more accurately, find patients who may be missing proven therapies, and support faster, fairer research recruitment. Working with CogStack, we have an exciting opportunity to translate unstructured clinical language into actionable insights that improve outcomes for our diverse East London population.”
CogStack co-founder Professor Richard Dobson—Professor of Biomedical and Health Informatics and Chief Research Officer at CogStack—will work closely with Professor Providência and the Barts team to deploy and evaluate the platform safely and at scale.
Professor Richard Dobson said: “Rui and the Barts Heart Centre team are asking exactly the right questions—how do we turn the richness of routine clinical text into better care, better research, and better operational insight? I’m looking forward to working with Rui and colleagues across Barts to deliver CLARITY over the next few years, and to demonstrate measurable benefits in coding quality, treatment optimisation and research recruitment.”
