# CLAMP-CS: a Cloud-based, Service-oriented, high-performance Natural Language Processing Platform for Healthcare

> **NIH NIH R44** · MELAX TECHNOLOGIES, INC. · 2020 · $503,546

## Abstract

Project Summary
Wide adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) has led to huge clinical databases, which enable the rapid
growth of healthcare analytics market. One particular challenge for analyzing EHRs data is that much detailed
patient information is embedded in clinical documents and not directly available for downstream analysis.
Therefore, clinical natural language processing (NLP) technologies, which can unlock information embedded in
clinical narratives, have received great attention, with an estimated global market of $2.65 billion by 2021 . In our
previous work, we have developed CLAMP (Clinical Language Annotation, Modeling, and Processing), a clinical
NLP tool with demonstrated superior performance through multiple international NLP challenges and a large
user community (over 1,500 downloads by users from over 700 organizations). Commercialization of CLAMP by
Melax Technologies Inc. has been successful (i.e., with a dozen licensed customers now); but it also reveals its
limitations as a desktop application in the Cloud era. Therefore, we propose to extend CLAMP to a new Cloud-
based, Service-oriented platform (called CLAMP-CS), which will address the identified challenges by: 1)
improving clinical NLP performance and reducing annotation cost by leveraging the state-of-the-art algorithms
such as deep learning, active learning and transfer learning and making them accessible to less experienced
users; 2) following new service-oriented architectures to make CLAMP-CS available via SaaS and PaaS, ready
for Cloud-based development and deployment; and 3) improving CLAMP-CS interoperability with downstream
applications following two widely used standard representations: HL7 FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability
Resources) and OMOP CMD (Common Data Model), to support the use cases in clinical operations and research
respectively. With these advanced features, we believe CLAMP-CS will be a leading clinical NLP system in the
market and it will accelerate the adoption of NLP technology for diverse healthcare applications and
clinical/translational research.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10011177
- **Project number:** 1R44TR003254-01
- **Recipient organization:** MELAX TECHNOLOGIES, INC.
- **Principal Investigator:** Frank J Manion
- **Activity code:** R44 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $503,546
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2020-04-01 → 2022-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10011177

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10011177, CLAMP-CS: a Cloud-based, Service-oriented, high-performance Natural Language Processing Platform for Healthcare (1R44TR003254-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-06-02 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10011177. Licensed CC0.

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