Powering Visual Data Discovery to Transform Healthcare
Rodrigo Barnes / Chief Technology Officer at Aridhia
The translation of clinical research into clinical practice remains a major challenge to healthcare providers across the world. All too often the translation of healthcare applications into clinical practice fails due to a breakdown in process or communication between the data scientists that build analytic models, and the clinical practitioners who consume them.
"We chose Shiny because it offers our users an easy, visual way of interpreting their data.”
- Rodrigo Barnes, Aridhia
A patient-centric approach to medicine
Precision medicine, and more importantly, the translation of precision medicine into the clinical workflow requires a patient-centric approach to care as opposed to an organisational approach. Advances in producing patient-generated data, ranging from full genome sequencing to advance sensors, is astonishing. However, advances in connecting this data together and presenting it in a format to enable multidisciplinary research teams to access, understand, and generate collective insights from it are a challenge.
Rodrigo Barnes is Chief Technology Officer at Aridhia.
“Healthcare innovation requires the collaborative sorts of multiple people with different skills and requirements. For example, clinicians, researchers, and analysts. The problem is that they face numerous barriers in terms of technology, skills, data comprehension, and geography. Each team does their work in a silo, even though they are working towards the same goal. That’s a real problem because it stifles change, and that is what Aridhia is trying to address.”
Improving comprehension, efficiency and communication
Aridhia sees a globally accessible, secure, and scalable data science platform that brings people together as an essential requirement in transforming how healthcare is practiced. Having launched AnalytiXagility – their collaborative data science platform – in 2014, Aridhia continues to enhance it with new functionality and analytic technologies.
“It’s vital that people are enabled to work together productively with their data. We wanted to ensure that every member of a multidisciplinary team – no matter what their skill set – could easily interact with and understand their data,” says Barnes. “This is vital when it comes to speeding the translation of analytics from research concept into analytically driven applications that are part of the clinical workflow.
“To do this, we embedded RStudio’s Shiny reactive data visualization technology into AnalytiXagility in order to bring data to life. Not only does this give context to huge amounts of complex data, but it really helps teams to leverage their diversity to enhance productivity and gain a competitive advantage.”
AnalytiXagility mini-apps featuring RStudio Shiny
“Our clients need to accelerate the development and deployment of analytically-driven clinical applications, so it was important to choose a technology that makes the work that data scientists do accessible to everyone,” says Barnes. “Now it’s a quick and simple job for them to develop web applications that make analysis visually available to their researcher and clinician colleagues. It brings a whole new level of understanding to a multidisciplinary team, and at a speed they would never have dreamed possible.”
“The insights that our Shiny-based mini-apps bring are essential to rapidly exploring, simulating, evaluating and validating new ideas,” continues Barnes. “That might be population health initiatives, precision medicine concepts, collaborative research hypotheses or adaptive trial designs, but the important thing is that you can do that quickly and from within AnalytiXagility’s private data environment. Data security is vital to healthcare research and delivery, so being able to do this within a data compliant environment is really important to our clients.”
Empowering data-driven healthcare.
“The mini-apps that are now being generated within AnalytiXagility are opening up routinely collected data to a whole new group of stakeholders,” Rodrigo explains.“These people now have the opportunity to bring their skills and experience to bear on healthcare challenges that will ultimately impact on the lives of patients.”
“Medicine is fast becoming a data-driven science, which is opening the door for the advent of genomic medicine, so it is a really exciting time to work in healthcare. Aridhia is proud to be an integral part of that and this collaboration with RStudio has really helped to reinforce the role that data-driven medicine has to play in changing healthcare.”
Aridhia is the clinical and translational informatics company behind AnalytiXagility – an advanced data science platform that has been designed to integrate and analyse fragmented clinical, patient and genetic datasets within an audited environment and use these integrated datasets to accelerate the development and deployment of transformational clinical applications. AnalytiXagility brings together some of data science’s most powerful tools, and in July 2015 Aridhia announced the integration of RStudio Shiny into the platform.
RStudio provides open source and enterprise-ready professional software for data science teams using R and Python.
