Last month saw Protogen Technologies’ unearth one of the best primary healthcare datasets in the world, in partnership with one of Australia’s leading medical practice management providers. This discovery has opened the door for discussion on the future of medicine, especially precision medicine in Australia.
How did we do it?
The dataset was unearthed using our breakthrough high performance capabilities, which range from big data processing through to applied statistics and machine learning. To allow Protogen to provide clinical insights in a minimum amount of time, Protogen built a data processing and insights platform that now allows for high performance processing of Primary Care data. This allows us to pull raw data from Primary Care practices very rapidly and compare their operational and clinical information against others.
What does the dataset contain?
Patient records from 2005 to 2016 across diagnoses, prescription, remedy, pathology and referral pathways. Protogen’s best in class analytical platform allows population health research to be performed rapidly at national, state, postcode, city and practice level.
What size are we talking?
"The size of just the test dataset is enormous, over one hundred times the size of the raw Panama Papers", said Omer Ingber, Protogen's Chief Technology Officer. Our solution architects began by extracting over 200 gigabytes of structured and unstructured raw data, which included clinical information as well as information on infrastructure, prescriptions and Medicare claims across Australia.
Insights and benefits
Mark Grosser, Protogen's CEO believes, "this new approach to General Practitioner data analytics is one of the best in the world: it can be expanded globally and can cover significant areas of interest for policy makers and represents years of potential research in clinical, logistical and financial outcomes".
The data platform has already raised questions to the possibility of providing quantitative answers to research topics such as:
- The correlation between socioeconomics and disease
- The most common treatments for specific diseases
- The most regular quantitative measurements that are associated with diagnosis
- The impact of health policy in the primary care practice
- Real evidence based medicine
There have been a number of other high value studies in the past that have also investigated primary care population health, including; BEACH (Sydney University), MAGNET (Monash Victoria) and the Dunnedin Study (New Zealand). This new approach will be a significant addition to this area of research.
So what now?
The next steps for research include increasing the practices that would like to participate as well as partnering with other data sources. Protogen is now also working with its partners on expanding into linking the data architecture with genomics driven Precision Medicine, specialist and hospital datasets. These research areas only scratch the surface of the multitude of opportunities available through this unique method for clinical data processing.
For more information, or to register your interest in working with Protogen on clinical data please contact info@onque.com.au or call +61 2 8572 4700