InterSystems has announced a partnership with digital engineering specialist Virtusa to enhance the healthcare data integration capabilities of Virtusa’s vLife life sciences platform.

The vLife cloud-based platform consists of a comprehensive, HIPAA-compliant data lake with multiple data sources, in addition to pre-built APIs and artificial intelligence and machine learning models.

Broader access to data

Through interoperability and integration with InterSystems’ IRIS for Health Data Platform, Virtusa consumers will have broader access to patient data from electronic health record systems and other clinical applications.

Improved analytics across the life sciences and healthcare industries has enormous potential to drive positive patient outcomes while reducing cost, with similar benefits for research and healthcare data management in general.

Virtusa data APIs, aimed at the life sciences industry, consist of academic and research data for EHRs, claims, clinical trials, devices and sensors, and DNA banks.

The vLife platform also boasts predictive tools with the capability to analyze more than one billion rows of public, synthetic or acquired data, and is HIPAA-compliant and recently attained HITRUST CSF Certified status.

Analytics in the mix

A pre-bundled analytics package targets care management, provider performance, health insights and consumer engagement, and additional visualization and predictive tools also are available on a subscription basis.

As part of the AI-as-a-service offering, trained AI models allow organizations to explore AI solutions and experiment with their own data – while the Iris for Health Data Platform is specifically engineered to extract value from healthcare data.

The aim behind the partnership is to help organizations and researchers access large repositories of high-quality health datasets for a range of secondary uses that have no clinical or medical implications, including software development, testing and clinical training.

InterSystems unveiled a “Clean Data as a Solution” platform back in October in a push to help normalize datasets for analytics ROI, and includes patient matching, aggregation, normalization and deduplication, among other features.

Critical to analytics projects

Clean datasets – no duplicate records, formatting errors, incorrect information or mismatched terminology – are seen as critical to even the most basic analytics projects.

“The healthcare industry is in the midst of a monumental shift from a fee-for-service to a fee-for-value reimbursement pay structure,” Anthony Lange, senior vice president of life sciences for Virtusa, said in a statement. “Therefore, our focus is on helping our customers improve patient care while reducing cost through improved analytics.”

Earlier this month, InterSystems signed an agreement for strategic cooperation with Inspur, a Chinese cloud computing and big data service provider.

Through the deal, Inspur will implement its healthcare big data platform using the InterSystems IRIS for Health Data Platform, providing data lifecycle management, interoperability, transaction processing and analytics.

Nathan Eddy is a healthcare and technology freelancer based in Berlin.
Email the writer: nathaneddy@gmail.com
Twitter: @dropdeaded209
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.