Pangaea’s AI platform Adopted by University of Illinois Cancer Center to Uncover Social Drivers of Health
South San Francisco, London, Chicago, November 10, 2025: Pangaea Data, a leading AI-driven healthtech company, has unveiled new research which shows how social factors that shape our health can be uncovered from patients’ health records using AI, ultimately providing better insights for clinicians and leading to better patient outcomes.
In collaboration with the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) Cancer Center, Pangaea demonstrated that its powerful AI platform can reliably uncover social drivers of health (SDOH) that are often buried within electronic health records (EHRs). In a study of 757,757 clinical notes associated with 5,585 urologic cancer patients, Pangaea’s AI platform detected SDOH features in all the records where it was available (which was 80% of the total population) and extracted approximately 767,000 discrete signals with an average accuracy of 94.7%. The most prevalent factors included health literacy (96.7%), substance-use history (93.2%), mood or affective issues (81.5%), and language barriers (50.1%).
Turning unstructured notes into actionable equity insights
Physicians have long recognized that non-medical factors, such as unstable housing, transportation barriers, neighborhood violence or language barriers, can influence health outcomes. Yet these factors are rarely captured in structured health data. As part of the study, UIC clinicians, researchers and computational experts partnered with Pangaea to configure and evaluate an AI model on its platform for uncovering SDOH information from patients’ medical records including social worker notes and care summaries.
By correlating social impacts with treatment outcomes, the collaboration is helping clinicians and researchers better understand how cumulative life and social factors can contribute to disease, and how to mitigate inequities in care delivery.
Crucially, this research has also been carried out with privacy in mind. The UIC Cancer Center’s Director of Oncology Informatics worked with the university’s Advanced Cyberinfrastructure for Education and Research to build a secure computing architecture that enables AI analysis without exposing identifiable patient records, providing a model for future projects involving AI and sensitive data.
From cancer clinics to health-system impact
This work can help support a proactive approach to equitable healthcare. By analyzing this data at a population level, Pangaea is able to better understand the underlying SDOH features that are contributing to health inequities in patient care. Additionally, by applying this approach at the point of care, clinicians are able to find these patients who may otherwise be missed for guideline-concordant care and ensure they receive equitable, optimal care, ultimately improving their health outcomes.
Vibhor Gupta, PhD, founder and CEO of Pangaea Data, said: “At Pangaea Data, our mission has always been to empower clinicians and researchers by unlocking the key parts of patient data that remain unseen within health records and notes. Collaborations like this one with the University of Illinois Cancer Center show how our AI can bring those insights to light, revealing the social and clinical factors that truly shape outcomes. By combining human expertise with AI-surfaced insights, we can help health systems deliver more equitable, efficient, and compassionate care at scale.”
VK Gadi, MD, PhD, deputy director & assistant professor of Medical Oncology, UIC Cancer Center, said: “Pangaea Data’s AI platform is helping to automatically unlock critical insights currently trapped in electronic health records, uncovering both clinical and social factors that contribute to inequitable health outcomes. This helps ensure that patients receive guideline-concordant screening and care, leading not only to improved patient outcomes but also to a reduced workload for clinicians and less burden on healthcare systems.”
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Contact: pr@pangaeadata.ai
