Increasing Research Efficiency: Case Study for Big Data and Healthcare

A new theme in the healthcare industry is “translational research.” Translational research is defined as work intended to move quickly from laboratory to patient, directly affecting patient care.

Through translational research, laboratory and clinical scientists collaborate and draw conclusions from the same pool of data; this collaboration strengthens the connection between the two distinct areas of research and reduces time lags due to procedural inefficiencies.

Two major barriers to translational research, identified by Oracle Health Sciences, include:

  1. Lack of seamlessly integrated, productized, and scalable infrastructure to support data management, analysis, and reporting
  2. Difficulty in jointly analyzing public domain data and data generated in-house

Case Study: A Force Multiplier for Translational Research

Sanford Research, a non-profit research organization formed between Sanford Health and the University of South Dakota, represents the largest, rural, non-profit healthcare system in the nation.

Sanford Research relied heavily on free monitoring services, such as Google Alerts, and proprietary subscription services, such as LexisNexis, but often navigated away from these interfaces to manually complete searches returning incomplete results. The Research team at Sanford knew exactly what they wanted to monitor:

  • available and awarded grants
  • journal articles
  • legislation
  • news
  • patents
  • clinical trial information
  • whitepapers
  • blogs/message boards
  • conference reports
  • institutional papers

BrightPlanet Solution: Deep Web Research Silo Services

BrightPlanet’s Deep Web Research Silo Services allow Sanford Research to control the data they want to see, saving them from sorting through irrelevant or inaccurate results. A topic-specific research silo serves as a force multiplier for Sanford’s researchers, reducing the time required to find relevant content while simultaneously increasing the quality of information.

Deep Web Investigators utilize Deep Web Harvester technologies to automatically harvest thousands of documents directly from websites Sanford Research identified as critical resources of information. Harvested documents are pushed into an easily searchable Research Silo, where a customizable suite of analytics technologies further enrich the information.

BrightPlanet configured the Research Silo to automatically refresh and update daily with the latest content from sources Sanford Research specified. This automated daily process allows researchers to stay current with the most recent developments in their topic areas, all within one searchable database.

Efficiency Solutions for Other Industries

Healthcare isn’t the only industry that can benefit from the harnessing of Big Data. Check out our latest whitepaper to see how four other industries have used BrightPlanet’s solutions to improve how they do what they do.




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Photo: paul bica