A consortium of technology companies comprising Cloudwick, MirrorWeb, and Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL (AWS), is working with PanSurg, an Imperial College London COVID-19 surgical network made up of healthcare professionals and academics from the Department of Surgery and Cancer and the Institute of Global Health Innovation, to build a global knowledge platform to help provide the healthcare community with guidance on delivering high quality care to COVID-19 patients.
Called REDASA (REaltime Data Analysis and Synthesis), the platform will pool global data on COVID-19 from over half a million sources and use machine learning and artificial intelligence combined with human curation to extract the most important insights in real-time for clinicians and policymakers.
The current pandemic has given rise to a huge mass of material on COVID-19 scattered across a vast range of sources. Yet, there is limited guidance and consensus on how to best deliver care for coronavirus patients. REDASA was launched to address these issues.
“Healthcare professionals are facing huge volumes of academic literature, public information and noise on COVID-19, making it challenging to extract key insights and translate these into best clinical practice,” said Mr James Kinross, Clinical Senior Lecturer and lead for PanSurg. We are excited to collaborate with Cloudwick, MirrorWeb and Amazon Web Services to create a reliable, accurate information source with REDASA, for healthcare professionals seeking guidance during the pandemic.”
REDASA is using MirrorWeb’s website capture technology to collect large volumes of data at speed. The organisation, which specialises in archiving and monitoring web channels, applies machine learning models to ensure accurate and credible information is gathered from public data sources such as medical journals, healthcare literature and news sources on a daily basis.
The information is then stored and processed on Cloudwick’s data and analytics platform, Amorphic, which facilitates the use of advanced data science techniques to help automate insight generation and provides a secure access model. Both the MirrorWeb technology and the Amorphic platform by Cloudwick are built on AWS.
“We are incredibly proud to be a part of the global PanSurg project. By unifying the expertise that exists across technology and the medical community, we've been able to apply MirrorWeb's archiving capabilities to support the frontline in its fight against COVID-19,” said Karl Stringer, Chief Product Officer at MirrorWeb.
“Cloudwick is humbled to be a part of the PanSurg consortium,” said Harshdeep Singh, Director of Operations – EMEA, at Cloudwick Technologies UK. “We are excited to provide Cloudwick's Amorphic data platform to help PanSurg achieve its vision of making research available to frontline staff during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“COVID-19 has made it clear just how challenging it is to find critical information quickly and easily in an ‘infodemic’ situation, with the noise of millions of articles to sift through,” said Dr Matthew Howard, International Healthcare Data Science Lead at Amazon Web Services EMEA SARL.
“This solution we are developing with PanSurg, and AWS Partner Network Partners, Cloudwick and MirrorWeb, combines the best of expert human review with AWS machine learning technologies. Our aim is to provide a new approach that will put the most accurate information possible in the hands of healthcare professionals, help improve medical knowledge, and develop more effective methods of patient care that will make a difference to frontline healthcare workers.”
A valuable collaboration
With the help of Cloudwick, MirrorWeb, and AWS, PanSurg has been able to quickly build their testing platform. The team has built a minimum viable product that will launch in the coming months. This will become an important legacy project with applications beyond COVID-19.
The present focus is to support the healthcare community on COVID-19 through REDASA. But if this is successful, Mr Kinross believes this model could instigate sharing healthcare information in this manner more widely, for example in other disease areas such as Oncology.
You can read more about the full story in Amazon's Day One blog here. The piece was also featured in publications including IT Pro, E&T, Channel Eye and Tech for Good.
PanSurg is an Imperial College London global hub for surgeons and related professionals to share experiences, policy, data and research for the delivery of safe, effective surgery during the pandemic.
MirrorWeb has developed a leading SaaS web archiving and monitoring solution for financial services, governments and international organisations across the private and public sector.
Cloudwick is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with machine learning, artificial intelligence, devOps and data and analytic competency certifications for enterprise and public sector. Cloudwick’s Amorphic is the first Data-Lake-as-a-Service for production ready Amazon ML, AI and BI decision automation.
