Clinerion’s Patient Network Explorer uses a hybrid cloud infrastructure to search patients’ EHRs and identify eligible candidates for clinical research. With an ontology-based approach, it extracts unstructured data that fits specific criteria from connected hospitals, aggregates the information, and compares it across all electronic information sources using artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and other advanced informatics methodologies.
The Clinerion hybrid cloud architecture is driven by requirements for patient privacy and data security, scalability, and flexibility. Patient Network Explorer comprises two types of installations, Clinerion Nodes in local intranets, hosting patient data; and the Clinerion Cloud, which orchestrates the overall system and holds job requests (e.g. search query requests). Data are only sent via intranet to the local Clinerion Node instead of to a central cloud.
The particular benefits arising from the use of cloud computing are in the areas of patient privacy and data security, and scalability and flexibility:
- There is no direct inbound connection from the Clinerion Cloud to the Clinerion Nodes, which makes the system very secure. The Nodes cannot be hacked for patient data. Patient data – de-identified and unlinked from identifiers, in any case – stays on local intranets and only report data (aggregated counts of query results) are sent from the Nodes to the Cloud.
- Using XEN Server cloud technology also allows the Clinerion technology solution to achieve virtualization – we can add virtual machines whenever needed and thus optimize resource allocation. This leads to easy scalability, both of size of patient data per Clinerion Node, as well as number of parallel requests to applications/GUI in the Clinerion Cloud. We can easily scale the overall system to support and process queries over millions of data records. Each Node has the data from one hospital. Adding another hospital means just adding one more Node, so the overall system is linearly scalable.
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Clinerion has been named a Finalist in the BIG Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing, recognizing the Patient Network Explorer as a unique solution that takes advantage of cloud technologies. |
Benefits of the Hybrid Network
The hospital is in control of patient data
- Identification of patients is fully in hospital hands.
- No patient data leaves the hospital and hospital infrastructure.
- Rapid internal analysis of patient data for own management purposes possible at any time.
The system is user-friendly and scalable:
- Trial teams create/improve query criteria within hours/minutes independently form IT-support.
- No limitation on number of queries (trials) running in parallel as Patient Network Explorer holds mirrored data of hospital information system.
