US-based software and hardware systems leader Oracle has launched a new platform, the Oracle Health Sciences Translational Research Center, to facilitate secondary use of healthcare data by both clinical and research organisations.
Developed in collaboration with healthcare organisations, academic research centres and biopharmaceutical companies, the Translational Research Center is couched as an integrated data-mining solution that will ease the trend towards more personalised, value-based healthcare.
It will enable pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, as well as contract and academic research organisations, to normalise, aggregate and analyse data from numerous internal and external sources, with the goal of identifying new predictive biomarkers, best practices for diagnosis and treatment, and more effective and safe therapies, Oracle says.
Cohort Explorer
The Research Center builds on Oracle’s existing life sciences and enterprise healthcare analytics solutions, such as Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation and Oracle Health Sciences Clinical Development Center.
A key component is the Oracle Health Sciences Cohort Explorer, which helps researchers and clinicians to identify and aggregate patients with similar clinical attributes.
The facility puts “powerful and easy-to-use analytics directly in the hands of researchers and clinicians, enabling them to be self-sufficient and timely in their analyses, while ensuring a secure foundation that delivers high levels of access control and traceability to support security and regulatory compliance requirements”, Oracle notes.
The initial release of the Oracle Health Sciences Translational Research Center will focus on the aggregation, normalisation and analysis of clinical information such as electronic health records. Features include:
- Support for more than 300 search criteria, such as patient demographics, diagnosis and medication.
- Flexible, real-time queries “that enable iterative hypothesis testing essential for translational research”.
- 37 pre-built operational reports to increase efficiency.
- Seven pre-built dashboards and a flexible and extensible data model enabling rapid development of additional reports and views.
- A standardised framework that integrates and manages disparate pre-existing command-line applications, scripts and algorithms commonly used in translational research.
Among the development partners for Research Center, which Oracle says has been benchmarked on “millions” of patient records, were Merck, Roche, Erasmus University Medical Center, Inova Health System, Moffitt Cancer Center, and Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute.
