The last decade has seen huge advances in the amount of data we routinely generate and collect in pretty much everything we do, as well as our ability to use technology to analyse and understand it. If you want to find out how Big Data is helping to make the world a better place, there’s no better example than the uses being found for it in healthcare.
Beyond improving profits and cutting down on wasted overhead, Big Data in healthcare is being used to predict epidemics, cure disease, improve quality of life and avoid preventable deaths. With the world’s population increasing and everyone living longer, models of treatment delivery are rapidly changing, and many of the decisions behind those changes are being driven by data. The drive now is to understand as much about a patient as possible, as early in their life as possible – hopefully picking up warning signs of serious illness at an early enough stage that treatment is far more simple (and less expensive) than if it had not been spotted until later.
With the increase in personalised treatments such as CAR-T and advanced therapy medicinal products, data collection in healthcare has never been so important. So what are the challenges? A key challenge is that there is an abundance of registries and databases for different indications and/or types of treatments, some of which are used routinely with high compliance rates, and others that are driven by physician champions in a minority of centres. This means that system integration and interoperability of data from different sources will be a key issue where existing registries or databases are to be leveraged.
Datatrial have been working with data (hints in the name) within the life science industry for nearly two decades now. Our proprietary EDC (Electronic Data Capture) system nowEDC has been used to collect data in over 30 countries from 100’s of sites however as the industry has evolved from simply collecting data, so have we. We now focus on data aggregation as well as the collection of data through our newest development Nucleus. For more information head over to our website www.datatrial.com