You’ve heard of IBM Watson Health, but how about Apixio? The San Mateo, CA-based company, founded six years ago, is dedicated solely to healthcare insights through cognitive computing and this week unveiled its Iris platform. The Iris platform uses natural language processing and machine learning to gain access to the almost 80% of data locked away in the 1.2 billion clinical care documents created annually in the United States, according to a company press release. Because this information is sometimes written by different physicians, is often unstructured, and each patient’s medical records can be spread across several systems, this data is difficult to access. Apixio CEO Darren Schulte, MD, likens healthcare data to a jigsaw puzzle thrown into the air: “It just kind of falls all over the place and the pieces are strewn about. Pieces of your data can be in many different record systems, can be written by many different types of specialists—you’ve got to assemble it together and then try to create some kind of profile that’s accurate, as a starting point.”