What you need to know about the rise of data in healthcare and beyond.
Data are omnipresent. Everything that we do — the electronic messages that we send and receive, internet sites we visit, money we withdraw from our banks and more — leads to the generation of a huge amount of new data every day. Needless to say, data hold an important place in today’s world. Given the immense value of data, it’s no wonder that within any business, this commodity has the potential to be a prolific investment.
The gathering and analysis of huge amounts of data enable businesses to gain a deeper insight into the behavior of their customers and the entire industry. This is achievable through data analytics. It allows companies to analyze raw data by using quantitative and qualitative procedures for making better business decisions, boosting their operational efficiency and increasing their return on investment (ROI).
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Realizing the benefits of data analytics, more businesses are employing service providers to carry out analytics on the data they provide to the outsourcing company. This, along with the enormous generation of data by organizations worldwide in different sectors such as healthcare, finance, media, communications and retail, are propelling the market to grow. According to Allied Market’s report on data analytics outsourcing market, the market is expected to accrue a sum of $5.9 billion by 2020, registering a CAGR of 29.1 percent from 2015 to 2020.
Businesses worldwide introduce new data analytics tools in the market to gain a handsome profit and grab a market share. But to understand the transformation at hand, it’s helpful to look beyond the numbers and at the new startups that are doing their part to change how healthcare and the business world at large operate.
For instance, in July 2018, Vivli, a nonprofit organization launched a new data-sharing and analytics platform to enable researchers to move faster toward new treatments and cures.
Ketchum, a leading global communications consultancy launched its Vital Health suite of services for healthcare companies, with the aim of helping to address their key challenges.
In August 2018, Managed Health Care Associates (MHA), a leading healthcare services and software company, in collaboration with Citrus Health, a digital health transformation leader, introduced a patient engagement platform called MHALink to help pharmacies build operational efficiencies and drive optimal patient outcomes.
In July 2018, SHYFT Analytics, a leading analytics platform for life sciences announced that its intelligent platform has been selected by Tetraphase Pharmaceuticals, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, to accelerate the launch of eravacycline, its lead antibiotic candidate developed to address multidrug-resistant bacteria.
The innovative platform Vivli allows researchers all over the world to advance clinical research. It allows them to discover, aggregate, share and analyze data from clinical trials. The platform includes 2,500 studies from 15 organizations with data from more than 1.3 million trial participants from more than 98 countries. The studies cover several disease areas, including diabetes, Alzheimer’s and malaria. Apart from storing and sharing clinical trial data on every disease, country and research entity, Vivli also enables researchers to integrate and assess data from several trials using state-of-the-art tools. Thus, researchers can validate their findings and avoid duplicative studies, thereby minimizing costs and preventing the participants from risks.
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Moreover, the data can be combined to ask new research questions, such as how a disease evolves over time and so on. Vivli’s executive director, Rebecca Li, Ph.D., said, “To this day, much of the world’s clinical trial data is not shared, and even when it is shared, it is not integrated across the entire clinical research ecosystem. Vivli acts as a bridge, enabling researchers across the world to build upon each other’s work and speed up science.”
Vital Health is a suite of services developed with the aim of helping healthcare firms figure out the causes of their challenges. The Vital Health suite includes the Vital Diagnostic tool, which is powered by advanced predictive analytics to help clients shape effective marketing and communications strategies. The tool evaluates several factors to determine a brand’s Vital Health Score, which considers transparency, innovation, compliance, patient-centricity, employer of choice, social responsibility, integration, quality and industry leadership.
Mary Elizabeth Germaine, executive vice president and managing director of Ketchum Analytics, said, “The Vital Diagnostic goes further than determining the correlation between brand health drivers and critical business outcomes — it uses advanced predictive analytics to actually determine causation. We helped one of the largest hospitals in the country gain its vital advantage by using the Vital Diagnostic to identify the top three messages that predicted desired behaviors, ultimately increasing both brand awareness and patient volume as a result.”
Managed Health Care Associates unveiled a new patient engagement platform, MHALink, which is designed to allow specialty and infusion pharmacies to facilitate operational efficiencies, better patient outcomes and more productive referral relationships for MHA members. Powered by Citus Health, the simple and innovative platform is accessible via any mobile device or computer.
MHALink simplifies the patient support process by offering quick answers to questions and allowing real-time communication among staff and patients. This eliminates most of the tedious, time-consuming, manual and costly procedures that can hinder the care provided to patients, thereby streamlining the communication among patients, caregivers and care team members. This simplifying of work leads to less stress for patients and greater therapy compliance.
Edward Izbicki, Jr., senior vice president, Alternate Site Division at MHA, said, “We are excited to collaborate with Citrus Health to provide a unique digital platform that supports our infusion and specialty member pharmacies' goals of improving patient outcomes and business processes. This alliance exemplifies our commitment to bring innovative software solutions to our member pharmacies.”
SHYFT’s cloud-based data analytics platform for life sciences helps Tetraphase to launch eravacycline, its lead antibiotic candidate, which has been developed to address multidrug-resistant bacteria. It enables Tetraphase to effectively integrate their data sources and create a holistic view of the relevant clinical and commercial data, providing a comprehensive market intelligence and commercial insights into several areas, including payer needs and the patient journey to meet commercialization milestones and drive the launch of the drug successfully.
As the market for outsourced data analytics grows, ventures like those in this article will likely become more common. It’s no question whether the industry as a whole will have an effect on patient outcomes, the drug pipeline and bottom lines. Rather, the question hinges on which startups will succeed in doing their part to transform healthcare.
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