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Aridhia partner with Microsoft Azure
AnalytiXagility collaborative research services extend to new users and new territories with enhanced features
At Aridhia, we see our job as providing the best online service for collaborative research in health and life sciences. Recently, we have seen increased adoption of public cloud services and today we are pleased to announce our partnership with Microsoft, as we take our services to Azure.
In our view, this provides the best alignment between rigorous information governance requirements in dealing with privileged data and providing advanced data management. Both are essential to help accelerate the translation from clinical research to clinical practice and so improve outcomes for patients.
Earlier this year, the NHS in the UK announced updated guidance for university hospitals and others, clarifying the use of public cloud in health. Elsewhere, we see more and more organisations working with Microsoft to deliver enterprise identity management or office tools using cloud, all running on Azure. Working in health, we have always supported customers in managing data within their legal jurisdiction. In some regions, Microsoft Azure has developed additional support for sovereign data management. All this is building up experience and trust in the quality of these hosted services.
As an SME, we always try to leverage the capabilities of our technology partners. Technology moves fast, and the bar for security and functionality keeps being raised. It’s clear our customers would benefit from the abstractions and service features from a public cloud platform. Features which have in the past been developed by solution providers (for example, security and encryption) are now built into the fabric of these platforms. Scalability and flexibility of deployment are key factors too – they are built into the growth patterns for the use of informatics in medicine, surgery and patient care more generally.
We work day to day with university medical centres, academic groups and pharmaceutical companies at the forefront of clinical research. All want to improve patient experiences and outcomes through research and innovation including machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). Where will the promise of personalised medicine and more broadly AI in health be developed and tested in a healthcare setting?
- Tools for clinicians are quite rightly highly regulated. This can slow the rate of innovation if it is a barrier to entry
- The healthcare community comprises many specialties, each with their own data to explore, problems to automate and outcomes to promote
- Research hospitals and pharmaceutical companies are investing in AI for health as part of their scientific and infrastructure spend
There are high profile individual company efforts to develop AI in health in a winner takes all approach. However, at Aridhia we have aligned our business to empower a broad base of innovation: where many projects can access data and tools within a research hospital or pharmaceutical R&D setting on an equal footing. While not all projects may succeed, the wider access the more chance we have to create a healthy climate of innovation. Aridhia can provide organisations, projects and teams with the same standard of security and functionality.
By running on Azure, Aridhia can extend our existing AnalytiXagility Workspace service and healthcare data access interface to offer a wider set of services from Microsoft and other partners. We can also reach new communities in countries where we don’t currently have a presence.
Public cloud remains hard for most our customers to access because it of its abstract, programmatic interface. Our services reduce the “adoption gap” to cloud by providing more user-friendly approaches tailored to the common tasks of research and analysis. We like to say we can grow with our users, from the part time clinical researcher working in the Data Table Analytics on a small cohort to a bioinformatician running a complex pipeline on many genomes. Today’s clinical researcher may become or employ that bioinformatician as the science of their project evolves and their skills develop. Aridhia can grow with them along the way. We look forward to delivering integration with more machine learning services such as Azure Machine Learning Services and Cognitive APIs as we find ways to adapt them to use in health and life sciences research.
Want to find out more? – get in touch by booking a demo or starting a free trial workspace today.