Maximize Real World Data Value with Panalgo on AWS

By Erik Maul, Sr. Director, RWE Partnerships – Panalgo
By Eric Girouard, VP of Engineering – Panalgo
By April Duddy, VP of Operations – Panalgo
By Ragib Ahsan, HCLS Partner Solutions Architect – AWS
By Srini Raghavan, HCLS Sr. Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

Panalgo

Life sciences organizations seek to maximize the value of their real-world data (RWD) investments and spend a significant amount annually generating real-world evidence (RWE). Despite significant RWD spending, organizations struggle to convert data into actionable insights due to challenges in managing multiple data sources, ensuring regulatory compliance, and maintaining robust security protocols. These complexities create bottlenecks that delay critical research and decision-making processes.

Operated as part of Norstella, a consortium of pharmaceutical solution providers, Panalgo’s Instant Health Data (IHD) Cloud platform on Amazon Web Services (AWS) delivers this capability by transforming how organizations leverage these substantial investments. This blog post explores how IHD Cloud can accelerate the journey from data acquisition to meaningful insights while maintaining the highest standards of data security and compliance.

Healthcare Analytics Challenges

FDA amendments in the 21st Century Cures Act have made Real World Data (RWD) and Real World Evidence (RWE) essential in therapeutic development. RWD encompasses health records, claims, registries, and device data, while RWE represents analyzed insights. According to the Fortune Business Insights report, Real World Evidence Solutions Market, the global RWD/RWE market, valued at $17.8B in 2023, is expected to reach $48B by 2032. Pharmaceutical companies invest roughly $20M annually in RWD, with 85% of FDA drug approvals (2019-2021) utilizing RWE.

However, organizations face significant challenges in maximizing RWD value. Healthcare data fragmentation creates integration difficulties across providers, with records maintained in incompatible formats by hospitals, pharmacies, laboratories, and insurers. In a McKinsey study, How can healthcare unlock the power of data connectivity?, it is estimated that 20-25% of US healthcare spending could be optimized through better data use. The typical data processing timeline includes 5-8 weeks for vendor coordination, 2-4 weeks for standardization, and 6-8 weeks for cross-vendor linking.

Healthcare organizations face complex choices in analytics implementation, as highlighted in ITRexgroup’s article, Top 5 factors affecting the cost of data analytics. Traditional approaches often lead to siloed data environments, where standalone tools or vendor-specific platforms limit cross-organizational analysis. These solutions frequently require complete system rebuilds when organizations need to switch platforms or expand capabilities, creating significant operational disruption. Combined with strict HIPAA and GDPR compliance requirements, these challenges hinder effective RWD utilization and delay therapy development.

Overview of Panalgo

Panalgo, an AWS Healthcare and Life Sciences partner, provides healthcare analytics solutions for RWD/RWE insights. Their platform, IHD Cloud, processes trillions of records annually to help pharmaceutical companies, medical device makers, regulators, and payers evaluate treatments and make data-driven decisions. Through advanced analytics capabilities, Panalgo bridges clinical research with patient outcomes while enabling swift analysis of complex healthcare datasets.

IHD Cloud technology key benefits

IHD Cloud accelerates healthcare analytics by 85% compared to traditional methods, with Panalgo’s Vice President of Operations noting that “median runtime for projects will be around 100 seconds” versus days. Its user-friendly interface enables both technical and non-technical teams to conduct complex healthcare studies, while transparency features promote collaboration across departments. The platform unifies analysis across claims, EHR, registries, and clinical trial data, helping life sciences companies quickly address questions about drug safety, effectiveness, and market access.

By deploying within customer environments, IHD Cloud eliminates data transfer barriers and external storage needs. This approach, combined with unlimited user licensing and SSO capabilities, reduces total ownership costs by 18% over three years compared to traditional solutions, while maintaining complete control over computing resources and centralized analytics.

IHD Cloud Architecture

The technical foundation of IHD Cloud is built using AWS serverless architecture, meaning it allows for automatic scaling and management of computing resources. Elasticity is particularly relevant in healthcare analytics, where workloads can vary from running quick feasibility assessments to processing complex longitudinal studies across millions of patient records. The serverless design supports security and compliance efforts by leveraging AWS’s built-in safeguards and automated security patching. Properly configured, these features help organizations protect sensitive healthcare data as part of their HIPAA and GDPR compliance programs. IHD Cloud leverages several key AWS services to deliver these capabilities (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Panalgo IHD Cloud solution architecture

• AWS Fargate for serverless container execution, running IHD application containers to process and standardize diverse data sources.
• Amazon DocumentDB for serverless elastic document storage. It is used to store IHD metadata and IHD logs.
• Amazon OpenSearch Service for medical vocabulary storage and search. serverless open-source distributed search and analytics suite derived from Elasticsearch.
• Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (Amazon EMR) for scalable Spark workloads powering computational analysis in large-scale data processing tasks in IHD.
• Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) for object and file storage of raw and processed data.
• Amazon EC2 for hosting IHD’s Spark application.
• AWS PrivateLink for establishing secure VPC endpoints to Amazon S3, enabling private access to data without traversing the public internet.
• Application Load Balancer for distributing traffic across IHD web servers and microservices, managing requests to different components of the application.

Accelerating healthcare analytics from months to days – Customer case studies

The effectiveness of IHD in healthcare analytics is demonstrated through several case studies spanning academic research, pharmaceutical development, and medical device evaluation.

A comprehensive analysis of platform efficiency emerged from an academic healthcare research project examining opioid use disorder risk factors. The traditional research approach required 5 months for data access approvals and 9 months for statistical analysis using R programming, totaling 14 months for project completion. When the same analysis was conducted using IHD, data access was granted within one day, and the complete analysis was finished in six days. This reduction from 14 months to one week was achieved while expanding the study’s scope from a single Medicaid database to a multi-payer dataset covering 245 million U.S. lives across Commercial, Medicaid, and Medicare beneficiaries.

In the pharmaceutical sector, clinical trial diversity presented a critical challenge for one of the top ten global pharmaceutical companies. Their epidemiology team employed IHD to establish demographic benchmarks across 11 distinct therapeutic indications. By conducting this analysis in-house over three months, rather than through traditional outsourcing channels, the company achieved a direct cost savings of $1.1 million. The resulting data now serves as their benchmark for ensuring representative enrollment in clinical trials.

Dexcom, a leader in continuous glucose monitoring technology, utilized IHD to evaluate the real-world impact of their real-time continuous glucose monitor (rtCGM). Through analysis of the Optum Clinformatics administrative claims database, they identified substantial reductions in healthcare resource utilization. After rtCGM device initiation, Type 1 diabetes patients showed a 54% decrease in inpatient visits, while Type 2 diabetes patients experienced a 48% reduction. The average hospital stay decreased by 0.39 days for Type 1 patients and 0.88 days for Type 2 patients. For Type 2 patients who did require hospitalization after starting rtCGM, their average length of stay decreased by 1.22 days. These findings provided Dexcom with concrete evidence of their device’s impact on healthcare costs and resource utilization.

These examples show how IHD consistently addresses healthcare analytics challenges across academic research and commercial applications. Organizations using the platform report significant improvements in efficiency and cost savings while generating faster evidence-based insights for healthcare decision-making without sacrificing analytical rigor.

Conclusion

As healthcare organizations continue to invest heavily in RWD, the ability to quickly and securely derive insights becomes a critical competitive advantage. By addressing the complex challenges of healthcare analytics within a secure, compliant framework, Panalgo’s IHD Cloud is accelerating innovation across the healthcare spectrum, from clinical trials to population health management. The evolving landscape of healthcare analytics demands solutions that can turn vast amounts of raw data into actionable insights efficiently. IHD Cloud, with its advanced capabilities deployed directly within customers’ secure environments, is positioned to meet this need, driving better patient outcomes and more efficient healthcare delivery.

For organizations ready to take the next step in their healthcare analytics journey, IHD Cloud offers a comprehensive approach to maximizing RWD investments while maintaining strict data control. To explore how IHD Cloud can transform your organization’s healthcare analytics capabilities, visit Panalgo on the AWS Marketplace or contact the Panalgo team for more information.

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Panalgo – AWS Partner Spotlight

Panalgo is AWS Healthcare and Life Sciences partner that provides healthcare analytics solutions for RWD/RWE insights.

Contact Panalgo | Partner Overview | AWS Marketplace