Overview

pHealthcare is continuously investing and committed to advancing human health. As a human data science company, IQVIA’s mission is to drive healthcare forward. By taking data from healthcare sources around the world, it’s able to find insights that help government agencies, pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions improve healthcare outcomes for patients around the world./p p For IQVIA, it's bigger than better clinical trials or advancements in technology. It’s about developing a new way to create better health outcomes through human data science. Through the power of the IQVIA Core, IQVIA is able to channel insight, scientific depth and the exceptional expertise that maximizes opportunities and ultimately, drives human health outcomes forward.  /p

Supernova Award Category

Data to Decisions

The Problem

pUnder a new corporate directive, IQVIA was tasked with reducing the time it took to turn around clinical trial analysis to clients. At the time the directive was determined, it took 3-6 months to turnaround clinical trial analysis back to clients, with a third of the time (1-2 months) solely dedicated to preparing the data in an FDA-approved format. IQVIA was looking to reduce this overall process in half, to 3-6 weeks./p p At the time, IQVIA’s Clean Patient Tracker (CPT) was unable to handle increased amounts of data from clinical trial studies. As an internal custom solution that uses RDBMS and Excel, Clean Patient Tracker was limited to providing a single source of patient data from multiple sources (safety labs, ECGs, eForms, queries, etc.) and unable to blend clinical trial data with demographic data. Instead, it would then compile the single source data into separate files, in a study-specific input folder. Once analyzed, Clean Patient Tracker would deliver the output in one row per patient, with the status of each activity that requires completion for that study./p

The Solution

pAs part of the solution to reduce turnaround time, IQVIA turned to Trifacta. IQVIA needed a solution that managed relationships across multiple datasets and efficiently navigates complex data wrangling tasks. Working with Trifacta, IQVIA developed a reusable flow template, which IQVIA’s teams were able to customize for each study in roughly 1-2 days and develop a completed report in 15 minutes. /p p /p pRather than requiring SAS programmers to draw out diagrams and manually pair massive amounts of data together (which could take upward of 1-2 months alone), Trifacta’s flow template reduced the cognitive load to show the analysts the higher-level view of the data automatically. This single view structure illustrated the way in which the data set was leveraged, and more importantly, eliminated the data sorting process that was holding up the team’s data analysis./p

The results

pIQVIA’s legacy approach to data preparation involved too many manual processes and was creating a disconnect between its business goals and the results it was able to deliver. /p p Since its integration with Trifacta, IQVIA has been able to utilize interactive visualizations and machine learning that helped its analysts highlight data quality issues and provide the intelligence IQVIA’s patients required./p p In addition to meeting its goal of reducing turnaround time, IQVIA has since been able to tackle its internal design challenges and integrate an intuitive data preparation experience for its lower-cost analysts./p

Metrics

pPrior to working with Trifacta, the manual process would take about 4-6 weeks for IQVIA with Clean Patient Tracker to standardize clinical study data in a format that was compliant with FDA standards. Note that on average, IQVIA is doing 50-70 studies as any given point. With Trifacta’s flow template, IQVIA is now able to generate a report in 15 minutes – cutting this process down to 1-2 days. In total, IQVIA has reduced its overall turnaround time by 92 percent for every new clinical studies data they receive./p p Additionally, IQVIA has seen an increase in prediction accuracy by four times its original rate. This has not only helped the company achieve its mission of finding the right patient for the ideal clinical trial, but has increasingly accelerated the pace of discovery. /p

The Technology

pIn working with Trifacta, StreamSets and Cloudera, IQVIA is able to provide an optimized workflow to transform data at scale. With Trifacta, analysts have the visual guidance and machine learning to make structuring, cleaning, blending and transforming data for analysts easier. IQVIA can simplify and optimize its capabilities to streamline data analysis across the entire organization. /p

Disruptive Factor

pDue to the nature of the data, there were strict guidelines for security and governance that the IT team had to follow when installing and implementing their data lake architecture. Additionally, because of FDA guidelines, IQVIA’s clients require that the data adhere to specific formats. These guidelines expanded the time it took to harden and refine the data process internally, but ultimately, the impact of the time savings was substantial. /p p IQVIA has given the power to the domain experts who traditionally only use Excel to perform complex data wrangling -- eliminating the need for in-house developers. The reallocation of resources to more strategic priorities has allowed IQVIA to simplify the data analysis process, in addition to reducing costs. /p

Shining Moment

pHistorically data professionals spend 80 percent of their time preparing data, and only 20 percent analyzing it. In order to keep up with the demands and needs of the healthcare system, IQVIA realized it needed to revamp its critical data processes. No longer delayed due to the billions of rows of datasets, IQVIA is able to better predict whether a patient is viable for a clinical study, ultimately, increasing IQVIA’s chance to match the ideal patient for critical clinical trials./p