Harnessing the Power of Real-World Data: How IHD and IHD Cloud Accelerate Insights

Today’s life sciences companies need efficient ways to turn real-world data into meaningful insights. To explore how Panalgo’s Instant Health Data (IHD) and IHD Cloud help organizations streamline analytics and enhance collaboration, we caught up with Matthew Marshall, Solutions Architect at Panalgo. He explains how these tools simplify data analysis, democratize access to insights, and help life sciences teams make evidence-based decisions faster.

Q: Let’s start with describing the “classic” version of IHD. How does it help life sciences companies turn real-world data into real-world impact?

A: IHD helps life sciences companies turn raw data into an analytic data set which can be used to uncover valuable patient level insights. It’s like painting a room: there’s a lot of work that’s involved, and much of it isn’t actually painting. You also need to empty the room, tape off the corners, and patch holes in the wall. The process of painting a room is the same process that teams undergo, taking a raw data source and turning it into a useful data set where they can identify a patient population of interest, outcomes, and any other necessary experiences of a patient’s journey. IHD allows them to work directly with patient-level data. We’re eliminating the need to write code against that data, so teams aren’t losing time with complex and error-prone conventional tools. Teams who take in raw data and use conventional tools will lose three or four months investigating what that data includes. With IHD, within a couple of weeks, you can build multiple analyses with real-world data assets, and derive actionable insights and evidence regardless of the complexity. For example, with IHD, a manufacturer can provide a regulator with meaningful statistics around the frequency with which an adverse event for their therapy occurs. The real-world impact is that the drug gets to be on the market longer or could get expanded into other indications and be available to more patients.

The same thing is true for providing evidence to payers. A payer might need evidence around cost savings associated with a certain therapy, a reduction in emergency department visits, or a reduction in length of inpatient stays. With IHD, life science teams can take this patient level data and create insights used in real-world negotiations with different entities to show the value of their treatment, therapy, device, or intervention.

Q: How does IHD help make advanced analytics accessible to everyone, from experts to first-time users?

A: Fundamentally, IHD is code-free. You can write code in it, but it’s a point-and-click functionality that sits on top of otherwise complex data. Regardless of their experience, team members have access to the same set of intuitive tools, which allows for collaboration, shared definitions, and inherently scalable analytics. Any power user can build out workflows and share them with their colleagues, and those workflows can be copied and pasted across all the available data sources that are licensed by that institution. It shortens the time horizon for creating useful insights. Centralization, standardization of the data, and not having to write code levels the playing field across user types.

Q: How does IHD’s integration of claims, lab results, and electronic health records help organizations make decisions and optimize their strategies faster?

A: HEOR and RWD teams can use data from NorstellaLinQ, our asset that combines real-world data with Norstella’s proprietary forecasting, clinical, regulatory, payer, and commercial intelligence data, or other data sources in IHD to produce feasibility studies that address how viable it is to build studies based around a patient population of interest, to find out whether there are enough patients, and whether there’s enough data to track a patient’s experience over time. In some cases, there also needs to be enough clinical granularity (e.g. labs, physicians’ notes) to support feasibility. NorstellaLinQ provides that level of breadth and depth, and teams can rapidly build out feasibility studies against all the available data sources simultaneously to determine whether the viability of that study should be pursued. They would use a tool like IHD to help identify the viability of the data source, repeat that feasibility across the other data sources that they have access to, and then make important decisions around how to prioritize data sources in their evidence generation plan.

Q: IHD Cloud has many of the same benefits as IHD except, as the name implies, it’s positioned in the cloud. How does this give organizations an edge in creating more impactful insights?

A: It’s further democratization of the available data. IHD is a democratization tool, where unified definitions can be used for analytic workflows that can be shared throughout the organization. With IHD Cloud, you get broader access to the same data across the organization, benefiting more end users with an intuitive interface. IHD Cloud further centralizes the analytics and data use in a life science organization. Going back to shared insights, a team more focused on clinical development can share analytic workflow definitions within the same environment while doing their own self-paced/service exploratory analysis. More users have access to more data, and it maximizes the utility of that data. Ultimately, more teams can develop their own insights and organizations can leverage the platform to centralize their evidence generation and analytics.

Q: Both IHD and IHD Cloud include custom training programs, expert assistance, and flexible support options. Why is this such an advantage for our clients?

A: Our high-quality support is integral because the client’s success is our own. We provide up-front training and real-time chat support where they can remain productive in our environment without having to hack a workaround or worse, work outside the platform. We have ongoing training via our client engagement team, who can provide tailored quarterly training to keep clients up-to-date and aware of relevant capabilities. Clients become experts in the tool, and any nuances to their needs can be addressed via real-time chat or other integrated resources we provide. Ultimately, it makes them more productive.

Q: What other benefits do IHD and IHD Cloud provide?

A: IHD Cloud expands access to data silos in other countries or data that traditionally cannot leave an environment. A client can work with data in France, for example, without the data ever leaving its location with only compliant outputs generated via IHDs interface. IHD Cloud gives them the speed and functionality of IHD without the friction or restriction of sending data elsewhere.

IHD and IHD Cloud are also data agnostic. They can work with any and all healthcare specific data sets on the market, giving life sciences teams a huge advantage.

IHD Cloud acts as a single pane of glass, meaning all of a client’s data is in one place. Clients can use the tool for data inventory management, rapid feasibility on internal data assets before looking at broader market, and as a central hub for all analytic outputs and projects to share with internal stakeholders.

Find out how IHD and IHD Cloud can help you turn real-world data into real-world impact. Contact us.