Can real-world data power faster breakthroughs in rare diseases?
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A look back: how BC Platforms supported personalized healthcare during the COVID-19 pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic emerged, it placed an unprecedented burden on healthcare systems worldwide — demanding speed, adaptability, and collaboration. Our mission to leverage data for better healthcare outcomes became more vital than ever, and we partnered with leading healthcare institutions to provide robust, real-time data management and analytics capabilities that supported patient stratification, clinical decision-making, and resource planning. Our technology empowered healthcare providers to turn complex, fast-changing data into actionable insights — helping them make informed decisions in moments that mattered most.
How we helped the NHS Trust of Southampton respond to COVID-19
We wanted to share an important success story from our partner Professor James Batchelor, Director of the Clinical Informatics Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine at the UK National Health Services Trust at Southampton (UHS). His team has been using our data management and analytics platform to integrate, stage and analyze real time clinical data in order to understand high level risk stratification and monitor the progression in COVID-19 patients while our clinical colleagues deliver care within the Hospital.
Our multi-faceted system was broadly adapted in the organization to accelerate the translation of research discoveries into clinical practice. In this case, we have provided a toolset to understand multiple aspects and parameters relating to COVID-19 patient treatment in the NHS:
- We are focused on supporting the multidisciplinary clinical team with accelerated real-world insights, such as findings enabling rapid decisions on managing this pandemic locally. Thus, this work has given clinical and operational insights to the situation, investigating key clinical questions such as monitoring comorbidities. Our system has allowed experts to examine harmonized real time data on disease presentation in combination with published epidemiological evidence, refining datasets with new evidence and performing virtual ward rounds to optimize resource allocation. Real world insights are interpreted and contextualized, and findings are sent back to clinical leadership in real time to support staff on the front lines. This enables clinicians to have updated knowledge along with latest literature and evidence, constantly allowing us to adapt our understanding of disease patterns in a local context
- BC Platforms has also automated the pipeline for clinical data extraction and analysis. This allows rapid patient cohort stratification by risk and disease manifestation. This is done based on a multitude of data, including the patient age group, comorbidity analysis, blood test results, and radiology results.
- Our platform is set up to regularly extract and update the clinical research database on a daily basis. Clinical reporting work has now been done through rapid jupyter notebook analyses with results in a digestible dashboard. The benefits of interoperability and automation in this case have had a large clinical impact from the operational perspective and in epidemiology insights to analyze patient geographic clustering and disease spread in the population. The whole implementation of these new protocols and pipelines was done in less than one week. Further on the research side, in clinical trials and observational studies, rapid assessment of analyses is now possible to benchmark results against limited clinical evidence of management of icu patients across cases from Italy, China, and Korea, investigating if there are treatment benefits mirrored across patients in different demographics, locations, and clinical interventions.
Overall, this project has demonstrated again that in personalized medicine and management of diseases, including infectious disease, it is important to have an effective system for data harmonization, process automation, and multidisciplinary collaboration. The context of real time clinical data analysis is needed to react to such situations. Moreover, a data management and analytics system is integral in order to turn around insights in clinically significant time.
University Hospital of Southampton (UHS) and the University of Southampton (UoS) has used BC Platforms’ rapid data modelling capabilities to build data structures for analysing patient characteristics. With integrated data analysis and modelling tools we have been able to build prediction models and relevant visualizations to help understand different scenarios and optimise treatment plans. During the last 2 years we have been using this system in various specific research projects. The key to this technology is the ability to coordinate research data in a single platform through multiple different processes that need to be done, which adds the advantage of quickly accelerating and translating research into clinical practice. This is important for any patient: cancer patients, asthma patients, and relevant to COVID-19. The point is if you are going to be a very successful research driven, evidence-based institution at the cutting edge of personalized medicine, you need integrated platforms.
Professor James Batchelor, Director of the Clinical Informatics Research Unit, Faculty of Medicine at the UK National Health Services Trust, UHS
A call for continued collaboration
The COVID-19 pandemic underscored the need for stronger data collaboration between hospitals, researchers, and technology partners. Healthcare systems must continue to integrate technology-based solutions that support secure data sharing, interoperability, and real-time insights.
At BC Platforms, we remain committed to empowering healthcare organizations with tools that accelerate data-driven decisions — helping transform lessons from the pandemic into long-term improvements in global healthcare.