New collaboration targets medical research
Cardinal Health, The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth), and AWS are collaborating with Virtusa to focus on uncovering the best treatment and management strategies for patients with diabetes and stroke-related conditions.
Virtusa is a global provider of digital strategy, digital engineering, and IT services and solutions. The new healthcare initiative applies AI and machine learning to healthcare data to advance medical research.
Virtusa and Cardinal Health will use a secure, cloud-based electronic health records (EHR) dataset of more than 30,000 patients to uncover hidden trends that will lead to new treatment strategies.
To do this, they are relying on vLife, Virtusa’s cloud platform that runs on AWS, and Cardinal Health’s Proxi patient population simulation. vLife consists of a HIPAA-compliant data lake that supports multiple data sources and includes pre-built APIs, AI, and machine learning models. The Proxi patient population simulation saves time because it requires minimum data cleansing and preparation before it’s applied to machine learning modules. Together, vLife and Proxi can accelerate research that can lead to breakthroughs in medical treatments.
“We are developing statistical methods and machine learning approaches to interrogate EHR databases and identify the best treatment strategies and risk factors for a variety of diseases using real-world evidence,” said Dr. Hulin Wu, the Betty Wheless Trotter Professor and chair of the department at UTHealth. “The EHR data simulated by Virtusa’s platform will help us test and validate our new predictive models and machine learning algorithms before applying them to real EHR data."
The simulated data will primarily focus on patients with diabetes and subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH), a life-threatening type of stroke. The data will be used by more than 20 faculty and students including clinicians, epidemiologists, informaticians, and computer scientists from the UTHealth School of Public Health’s Department of Biostatistics and Data Science.
“The future of life sciences will be driven by innovation that focuses on a high degree of personalization that comes from unlocking the power of simulated data,” said Anthony Lange, senior vice president, Life Sciences, Virtusa. “As data drives technological and economic growth, we will continue to leverage our deep industry and technical expertise and relationships with industry leaders including Cardinal Health, AWS, and UTHealth to uncover new ways to apply technology to accelerate positive patient outcomes.”
To learn more about Virtusa’s Life Sciences capabilities, visit www.uth.edu, www.cardinalhealth.com, https://aws.amazon.com, and www.virtusa.com/practice/life-sciences.