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Kim Carter Joins Aridhia as New Chief Data Officer

David

I put out a LinkedIn post last week welcoming Kim Carter to Aridhia as our Chief Data Officer. Kim and I thought it would be worth a few additional comments and thoughts related to Aridhia and the wider data landscape within Healthcare and Life Sciences.

For Aridhia, it’s great Kim has chosen to join us; we worked together closely during Covid through the Gates Foundation and Minderoo-funded ICODA program and more recently with the Liver Cancer Collaborative (LCC) based out of the Harry Perkins Institute for Research in Perth, WA. Kim has the (very helpful) ability to think strategically about the direction of travel for secondary use of multi-modal data within healthcare research while simultaneously engaging in the technical, implementation and governance detail that moves things forward day to day. Like I said, it’s a neat skill and we’re glad he has joined Aridhia.

On the wider landscape, two things are becoming increasingly obvious. The first is the demand to integrate routine clinical data from Electronic Patient Records with deeply phenotypic research data is now a mainstream requirement for secondary research use of patient data (with routine primary use soon to be an inevitable consequence). The second is the widespread acceptance that no single organisation has enough data – by itself – to make necessary breakthroughs in understanding the underlying biology of disease to improve patient outcomes either through drug discovery and development or improved clinical pathways. Collaborative networks that facilitate the trusted sharing of data and effective collaboration between domain experts are now pre-requisites for progress. This brings a new level of attention to data governance, data use conditions, and respect for the secondary use of privileged data.

We’re working closely with our customers around the world to configure production services through the Aridhia DRE to those and other advanced use cases. Having Kim join us to help scale those deployments, work with our customers and contribute to our open-source programs is ideal.

Kim

I am thrilled to join David and the team at Aridhia, becoming part of their world-leading activities with LCC, AD Data Initiative, GOSH, and other groundbreaking initiatives. The opportunity to work alongside such a talented and innovative group is incredibly exciting. I look forward to contributing to the ongoing efforts to help drive healthcare advancements and patient improvements through data-driven solutions and cutting-edge research we underpin and enable.

As we embark on this journey together, it is essential to emphasise the importance of multi-modal data integration and cross-site/cross-national collaborative efforts, as David described earlier. Building on this further, by equally focusing on the “Interoperability” and “Reusability” components of the FAIR principles through frameworks like the OMOP common data model and federation techniques, we can ensure that high quality multi-modal data (e.g. clinical data, ‘omics, imaging) are not only accessible but also comparable and combinable with those from collaborators globally in a more readily available form. Having high-quality interoperable data readily available massively accelerates research and clinical collaboration and opens up the use of Machine Learning and GenAI by reducing the significant time typically spent on data preparation for every separate piece of work. Aridhia’s Digital Research Environment (DRE) provides a trusted mechanism of enabling data access, interoperability and collaboration between researchers, empowering clinicians and other partners to harness the full potential of their data to bring maximum impact and benefits to patients and families.