Einar Martin Aandahl is the CEO and co-founder of Ledidi, a Norwegian company that has developed a cloud-based service to help clinicians collaborate on data across hospitals. Photo: Ledidi

Norwegian technology to help UK oncologists

British hospitals can now improve care of breast cancer patients by using a new health data platform from Norway.

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer’s UK branch has announced grants to provide NHS hospitals with subscription access to a research and registry platform from the Norwegian company Ledidi. The platform will be used for clinical audit of breast cancer patients.

Ledidi, a member of Oslo Cancer Cluster, was formed by two academic surgeons, who saw the need for better tools for collecting, structuring, analyzing and visualizing health data.

Improving patient treatment

Knowledge about the effect of cancer treatments and diagnostics is often limited to what is known from clinical studies, but little is known about the effect once they are implemented in standard clinical practice.

“For cancer clinics, the possibilities of monitoring patient outcomes combined with other data from their patients daily, gives new possibilities of understanding the effect of their efforts and identifying areas in patient care and treatment that could be improved,” commented Einar Martin Aandahl, CEO and co-founder of Ledidi.

The problem is that data gathered from patients is often fragmented in different systems, unstructured and contains a lot of free text. To be able to monitor patients’ outcomes, the data needs to be structured in a way that makes them available for analysis.

Collaboration between clinics

The two clinicians teamed up with engineers and developed a cloud-based service to help clinicians and researchers collaborate on data across hospitals and faster reach novel discoveries.

“Ledidi Core allows the clinicians to create structured databases and forms for data capture, so that data can be collected in the same format from several collaborating colleagues or clinics. The solution is designed for multiple participants to collaborate on a shared database,” Aandahl explained.

According to Aandahl, the database can be shared between health personnel, but they cannot access each other’s data directly, and it is done in compliance with security and privacy regulations. Still, everyone can run analysis on the whole dataset and get instant results from the data. Aandahl also informs us the database can be used both for research studies and patient registries.

“By collaborating with other clinics, one also gets the possibility to compare practice from clinic to clinic and find a benchmark for how your own clinic is performing. By this, we aim to break down the barriers between research and clinical practice,” Aandahl added.

Towards data-driven healthcare

Almost every sector of society is becoming increasingly digitalized, but the health care sector has been lagging behind, both because of strict regulations on health data and the complexities in providing healthcare.

“By finding safe and easy ways to structure and collaborate on health data for secondary purposes, we can generate new knowledge and insights that can improve patient care and the health of many people. We believe health care needs to be more data driven and we work to lift the barriers standing in the way,” Aandahl said.