Fortune 50 Company Launches Metadata App to Accelerate Real World Evidence

At BioIT World earlier this year, our customer—a Fortune 50 company—discussed the launch of its real world evidence application built on MarkLogic’s database platform …

A Metadata Catalog for Real World Evidence

For a Life Sciences organization, the first step in the creation of real world evidence is for it to be able to determine all of its data sources, where they are located, who can access the content, and what types of questions can be derived from it. Pharmaceuticals and Medical Device Manufacturers purchase a significant amount of third-party data sets in the search for real world evidence. But before data scientists can analyze this data to perform hypothesis testing, they must first bring it all together and search it for key concepts and to learn how the information is related or connected. Our customer needed to build a metadata catalog that would allow new real world evidence to become more quickly available as well as to make it easier for researchers to find the information they are searching for among it.

So, working in conjunction with a consulting services partner, MarkLogic built a metadata catalog for the company. This metadata catalog allows the company’s pharmaceutical research staff to more quickly find valuable assets for real world evidence—including pathology results, medical records, clinical data, etc.

Before using MarkLogic’s database platform, our customer relied on a manually curated SharePoint metadata catalog that was used to store high-level metadata, such as data set and document abstract summaries. With that solution, obtaining comprehensive information on a specific drug or health condition was constrained by how fast its IT team could add metadata on new data sets or documents. Further, the company’s limited metadata meant that drug researchers had to spend too much time sifting through immense volumes of real world evidence data spanning decades of study and millions of patients.

The new metadata catalog enables the company to identify all of its data sources, find out where they are stored and who has access to them, and determine what types of questions can be derived from the content—and then make all of this information searchable. With the new metadata catalog, researchers can also efficiently filter through metadata to zero-in on data sets with patient candidates and studies most relevant to their areas of research.

A Database Platform With Key Advantages

The company chose MarkLogic’s database platform because of its ability to ingest and store data from a variety of formats, harmonize it, and find relationships among the data. The flexible capabilities of the platform, its powerful semantic search and ability to include Java and REST APIs, enabled the company to recognize the many advantages of MarkLogic—an agile, scalable, secure database platform—over limited, off-the-shelf tools.

Today, our customer’s metadata catalog allows researchers to more quickly derive critical insights to accelerate product development across both the Healthcare and Life Sciences markets—giving the multinational company a competitive advantage.

Life Sciences companies will achieve time and cost benefits by using an agile database platform that supports the unique and rigorous data requirements for real world evidence. The best database platform for integrating disparate data from silos, MarkLogic is next-generation data enablement technology that empowers data scientists to:

• Ingest and integrate all types of disparate data—structured and unstructured—and harmonize it with a common language.
• Ensure data governance, including quality and transparency by addressing concerns with provenance, traceability, timeliness, completeness and accuracy.
• Query across data and metadata with semantic search that enables discovery of hidden relationships and connectedness among the information.
• Rapidly build and search on specific data views. Users can filter and analyze data using a variety of questions to find precise information. For example, if researchers need a view of patients over the age of 35 with diabetes, COPD and a thrombosis—MarkLogic can deliver up that information within seconds.

Learn More

For more information on how MarkLogic can advance your organization’s efforts around real world evidence, please:

• Learn how MarkLogic Accelerates the Delivery of Real World Evidence: Your real world data is mounting but your point solution can’t keep up with your organization’s need for faster answers and insights. Why are you using technology that holds you back?

• Read The Importance of Metadata to Life Sciences What if you could run complex queries across all of your data and metadata—no need to shred it first—with lightning fast results? Learn how MarkLogic features powerful search and semantics capabilities that enable you to extract more value from your metadata.

• Check out How Can Enterprise NoSQL Advance Analytics in Life Sciences? Adverse event data is often buried in mounds of information, requiring extensive filtering that can take hours just to find it. Learn how MarkLogic enables data scientists to quickly narrow down datasets to just the “features of interest,” reducing the time it takes to get data to the machine learning aspects of signal detection.