A brand new startup emerged from stealth on Tuesday on the HLTH convention in Las Vegas. The Irvine, California-based firm, named Avandra Imaging, is a federated community for de-identified imaging information.
Avandra’s primary aim is to make it simpler for well being techniques, biopharma corporations and AI builders to entry imaging information that may assist advance their analysis, defined CEO and founder Ryan Tarzy.
“The problem now we have proper now’s a final mile downside. We have now spent the final 20 years and God is aware of what number of {dollars} on digitizing medical data and transferring into the EHR. However proper now, the medical level of fact of imaging is what’s arguably essentially the most worthwhile information. And it’s simply not broadly accessible — particularly in a big sufficient, numerous sufficient dataset for analysis,” he remarked.
Tarzy stated he typically hears medical researchers and AI builders lament the truth that they will’t get their arms on imaging information.
For instance, he identified that there have been some corporations attending HLTH looking for to construct instruments for earlier identification of Alzheimer’s or to higher handle the effectiveness of Alzheimer’s remedy. To construct these sorts of instruments, researchers want mind imaging, not simply EHR information, Tarzy famous.
“The issue is that no person is aware of the place these pictures are, although there are hundreds of thousands of sufferers. It’s a needle in a haystack downside, they usually don’t even know what haystack to look in to search out the needle,” he declared.
To handle this downside, Avandra has constructed a de-identified information community by which researchers can extra simply find the imaging they’re looking for. Accessing this information will assist researchers with issues like medical trial design and algorithms coaching, Tarzy stated.
To him, Avandra has two primary opponents: Gradient Well being and Segmed.
“They don’t have a federated mannequin, they usually don’t have the community that now we have,” he said.
A federated community ensures that healthcare information stays with its authentic homeowners — permitting hospitals and different suppliers to take care of management and adjust to privateness legal guidelines whereas nonetheless facilitating collaborative analysis, Tarzy defined.
As for Avandra’s enterprise mannequin, the startup operates on a market mannequin.
“It’s license plus skilled companies and we income share again to the contributor,” Tarzy stated.
Avandra already has some prospects, however it’s ready to reveal what number of and to disclose their names, he famous. He did say that the corporate is worthwhile and has 40 staff.
Along with rising from stealth mode, Avandra additionally introduced a partnership with Datavant, a well being information platform that connects and de-identifies affected person information throughout organizations. Datavant’s community consists of greater than 70,000 hospitals and clinics.
Datavant makes use of tokenization software program, which converts affected person identifiers, equivalent to names or medical file numbers, into distinctive, encrypted tokens. This allows researchers to match data throughout datasets with out revealing private info.
For the brand new partnership, Datavant constructed customized know-how to tokenize Avandra’s imaging information, Tarzy identified. This can assist researchers match up a affected person’s imaging information with their different medical data with out ever revealing the particular person’s id, he famous.
Photograph: Darunechka, Getty Photographs
