Brim's August 2025 Release: Validation Improvements & Smoother Updates

At Brim, we’re always looking for ways to make chart abstraction not only faster, but also more trustworthy and easier to manage across your institution. This August, we’re excited to share some powerful improvements that do exactly that.

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🧪 Validation, Now Smarter

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Validation is at the heart of high-quality chart abstraction: it ensures your extracted data aligns with the definitions your team depends on. We've gotten a lot of positive feedback on our new Validation Tool, and are also learning more about how to support your use cases.

With our latest release, validation in Brim is more flexible. In addition to booleans, it now supports timestamps, floats, and free text values. That means Brim does its best to interpret non-boolean results, compare them against the comparison dataset, and flag any mismatches.

When something doesn’t line up, Brim now provides richer detail about why. This starts with validation file upload: you can see detail on which rows in the comparison dataset were matched to values in Brim, which were skipped, and the reason for skipping, whether that's a missing value, duplicate value, unsupported data type, or something else.

You'll see this detail flow through to the validation view, where you can see details of the values, matched and unmatched. You'll also see the underlying reasoning, helping you debug faster, refine your variable definitions, and build confidence in the accuracy of your workflows.

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🔑 Easier Updates, Still Secure

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Keeping software up to date can feel like a chore, especially in cloud deployments where they need to be controlled and secure. That’s why we’ve made Brim updates simpler without compromising control.

Organizations still initiate Brim updates, but now the update script automatically manages access for you. No more tracking down an updated token to update. This helps your IT team stay current on the latest Brim features with less friction and the same level of institutional oversight.

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✨ How to Get the Latest Brim Version

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To take advantage of these improvements, make sure you’re running the newest release:

• The release version is: 2025.08.28
• You can check your current version in Settings > About
• If you need help upgrading, reach out to your admin.

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📚 Keep Exploring with Brim

We’ve published some new posts that might be useful to your team:

• How Brim Works: Turning Clinical Notes into Structured Data
  
  
• A Guide to Chart Abstraction
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• Powering Chart Abstraction Across an Institution: 100 Projects at Vanderbilt
  

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