Building AI with MongoDB: How Flagler Health's AI-Powered Journey is Revolutionizing Patient Care

Angela Lee

#genAI#Vector Search

Flagler Health is dedicated to supporting patients with chronic diseases by matching them with the right physician for the right care. Typically, patients grappling with severe pain conditions face limited options, often relying on prolonged opioid use or exploring costly and invasive surgical interventions. Unfortunately, the latter approach is not only expensive but also has a long recovery period. Flagler finds these patients and triages them to the appropriate specialist for an advanced and comprehensive evaluation.

Diagram of the current state without Flagler. The diagram shows the categories of Physical therapy, payor, substance use disorder, mental health, care management, and physician all interacting with each other with the Physician at the focal point of all the interactions.
Current state without Flagler

Flagler Health employs sophisticated AI techniques to rapidly process, synthesize, and analyze patient health records to aid physicians in treating patients with advanced pain conditions. This enables medical teams to make well-informed decisions, resulting in improved patient outcomes with an accuracy rate exceeding 90% in identifying and diagnosing patients.

As the company built out its offerings, it identified the need to perform similarity searches across patient records to match conditions. Flagler’s engineers identified the need for a vector database but found standalone systems to be inefficient. They decided to use MongoDB Atlas Vector Search. This integrated platform allows the organization to store all data in a single location with a unified interface, facilitating quick access and efficient data querying.

Diagram of what Flagler can offer. The Flagler Health Tech Platform puts the sectors of Physical Therapy, Care Management, Dietitian, Mental Health, and Substance Use Disorder into one platform that the Physician then interacts with.
What Flagler can offer

Will Hu, CTO, and Co-founder of Flagler Health, emphasizes the importance of a flexible database that can evolve with the company's growth. A relational model was deemed too rigid, leading the company to choose MongoDB's document model. This flexibility allows for easy customization of client configuration files, streamlining data editing and evolution. The managed services provided on MongoDB's developer data platform save time and offer reliability at scale throughout the development cycle.

Flagler Health collaborates with many clinics, first processing millions of electronic health record (EHR) files in Databricks and transforming PDFs into raw text. Using the MongoDB Spark Connector and Atlas Data Federation, the company seamlessly streams data from AWS S3 to MongoDB. Combined with the transformed data from Databricks, Flagler’s real-time application data in MongoDB is used to generate accurate and personalized treatment plans for its users. MongoDB Atlas Search facilitates efficient data search across Flagler Health's extensive patient records. Beyond AI applications, MongoDB serves critical functions in Flagler Health's business, including its web application and patient engagement suite, fostering seamless communication between patients and clinics.

This comprehensive application architecture, consolidated on MongoDB's developer data platform, simplifies Flagler Health's operations, enabling efficient development and increased productivity. By preventing administrative loops, the platform ensures timely access to potentially life-saving care for patients.

Looking ahead, Flagler Health aims to enhance patient experiences by developing new features, such as a digital portal offering virtual therapy and mental health services, treatment and recovery tracking, and a repository of physical therapy videos. Leveraging MongoDB’s AI Innovators program for technical support and free Atlas credits, Flagler Health is rapidly integrating new AI-backed functionalities on the MongoDB Atlas developer data platform to further aid patients in need.

Head over to our quick-start guide to get started with Atlas Vector Search today.