HEALTHCARE technology business Aridhia has won a 10-year contract with Great Ormond Street Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
The contract was called a “great endorsement” of the company’s platform for analysing medical information on patients.
The deal will see Glasgow-based Aridhia deliver the research and innovation component of the trust’s digital transformation programme, with the hospital adopting Aridhia’s data analysis platform.
And Aridhia’s chief executive Chris Roche said he hoped the contract would act as a springboard to help the company’s growth.
“Great Ormond Street Hospital is world-renowned and it is an honour to be given the opportunity to support such extraordinary researchers deliver ground-breaking research across multiple clinical domains,” he said.
The AnalytiXagility platform will function as the trust’s digital research environment, essentially helping to transform the way Great Ormond Street manages its research projects.
As part of the wider digital transformation, the service will be integrated with the trust’s new electronic patient record system.
Dr Peter Steer, chief executive, Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children Foundation Trust said: “We look forward to working with Aridhia to develop an innovative platform which will transform the way we undertake and collaborate on research. This will allow us to bring more life-saving treatments to children with rare diseases in the UK and worldwide.”
The contract was won after a year-long tender process ended with Aridhia chosen as preferred supplier in February.
Mr Roche said: “The fact they went through 12 months and it was a rigorous process with 200 patients, staff and clinicians involved in the selection process, this wasn’t a decision made lightly. We have been tested against the market and they chose us. It’s a great endorsement.”
He said the use of data in medical research would help collaboration, both across institutions and borders. And the challenge the business had overcome was to allow for more collaborators, with more data and more access as governance is getting stronger.
“Research funding demands collaborations across European countries and institutions,” he said. “You’re bringing hospitals together with pharma, with life sciences companies. [It leads to] larger data sets and more researchers on projects.”
Mr Roche said the contract was a very important one for the business, but added that every contract was important.
“Certainly it’s a great endorsement by a premier brand, someone who is globally recognised that will be placing their trust in us for the next 10 years. It’s not like it’s one project, it’s every project so the significance can’t be underestimated.”
Aridhia was set up in 2007 by Scottish software entrepreneur David Sibbald and is based at University of Glasgow’s clinical innovation zone at the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital.
Mr Roche said he hoped the platform would have a disruptive effect on the market, acknowledging that healthcare has been slow to embrace the cloud, when compared to the likes of banking and retail.
He said this was for good reasons, but there was a shift beginning to take place. “We hope this will have a good accelerating effect for us and that we can take advantage of that,” he said.
Mr Roche said two members of staff had been recruited directly to work with Great Ormond Street, based in London. He said it was difficult to ascertain the indirect benefit of staff numbers from cloud-based systems, but overall staff numbers at the company are approaching 50.
Its technology helps facilitate what is known as precision medicine, which uses the analysis of huge volumes of data covering genes, environment, and lifestyle to help researchers find breakthroughs in treatments for diseases such as cancer.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here