At the Connected Health Conference in Boston this week, Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina-based Validic announced the launch of its next-generation data platform, as well as a partnership with Partners Connected Health, one of the organizers of the conference.
The new platform, called Inform, is a complete re-engineering of Validic’s service, in which the company works with healthcare providers to create the pipeline that data flows through from health devices to healthcare systems or other stakeholders.
“As we’ve been looking at the access patterns, one of the things we noticed is a lot of folks are trying to bring in the large volume of data that we have as quickly as possible, so they can do real-time population analytics and so they can message users as quickly as possible once the data hits the system," Validic CEO Drew Schiller told MobiHealthNews in an interview on the sidelines of the conference, "When you are working at scale — and we’re fortunate to have a number of clients who have hundreds, thousands, millions of users — that’s a lot of transactions back and forth."
Validic’s old system was transactional, whereas Inform is streaming, a difference that allows the new system to handle more data, faster.
“It’s actually based on the concept of the Twitter stream where there’s just a massive volume of data so you basically open up a connection to our streaming API and just get the flood. So when data hits the system you get it immediately,” Schiller explained. “The other thing it opens us up to is with that more transactional API, things like continuous data or waveform data, were really difficult to deliver in that transactional format. But now, because we have this stream, we can actually deliver the more consistent, streaming type of data which I think is really important to the future of healthcare.”
Inform also addresses the “firehose problem” in patient-generated data, where providers find themselves with more data than they can use. The new platform allows Validic to implement rules, alerts, and triggers so that end users only receive some of the data.
“Everyone still wants all the data, but they want it in a warehouse for future review,” Schiller said. “However, for being able to take action, they just need the signal, the derivative of that data. In that instance they can subscribe to that track and they don’t have to handle the heavy processing or the complexity of a rules engine on their end.”
As for Partners, Validic will be helping the health system integrate patient-generated data at a comprehensive system level. This includes creating the capability to connect with 420 different health devices, as well as managing the workflow of what happens to the data.
“This collaboration will allow patients to share personal health data with their care team seamlessly and securely using their own consumer devices,” Kelly Santomas, senior director of Connected Health Solutions at Partners, said in a statement. “Of even greater significance is the ability to make this data actionable and provide evidence-based care to improve clinical efficiencies, empower patients, and strengthen the patient-provider relationship. This has implications throughout patient care, including improved management of chronic illness and at-risk patient populations."
