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Alteryx > Case Studies > Castor and The Information Lab: Leveraging IoT to Analyze COVID-19 Medical Research
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Castor and The Information Lab: Leveraging IoT to Analyze COVID-19 Medical Research

Technology Category
  • Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
  • Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
Applicable Industries
  • Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
  • Product Research & Development
Use Cases
  • Automated Disease Diagnosis
  • Disease Tracking
Services
  • System Integration
The Challenge
The medical research industry is heavily reliant on the convergence of science and technology to enable progress. However, the vast amount of medical data and information required to support these studies can potentially hinder the rate of progress. This was a challenge that Derk Arts, Founder and CEO at Castor EDC, a Netherlands-based data capture platform, was acutely aware of. Trained as a doctor, Arts was frustrated with outdated systems, processes, and lack of forward-thinking for patient-data. The aggressive spread of the coronavirus created an unprecedented urgency to process and investigate vast amounts of medical data captured within the Castor platform. The priority was enabling customers to take their data and quickly generate insights in a chaotic global environment. Arts was specifically looking for a vendor that could develop a web connector for Tableau to ensure they stayed true to the Castor software.
About The Customer
Castor EDC is a Netherlands-based data capture platform that was founded by Derk Arts. The platform is used by more than 50,000 researchers across 90 countries in their research. Castor’s platform has supported more than 4,100 commercial and academic studies that cover a broad range of disease areas including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, rare diseases, and oncology. The Alteryx Analytic Process Automation Platform™ is used to safely access, validate, and transform vast amounts of data from traditional and decentralized trials. Medical researchers get access to the data in interactive dashboards so that they can easily share insights with medical staff.
The Solution
Castor partnered with The Information Lab, Netherlands, who proposed the Alteryx APA Platform as the solution. The Castor platform offers a REST API to obtain data for further analysis. Alteryx Designer quickly builds workflows that authenticate against and connect to this API and retrieve all relevant study data. Data from different API calls is combined to enrich the dataset and the workflow is scheduled on Alteryx Server, where they benefit from access control, collaboration, and version management. In simpler terms, the Castor platform feeds data into Alteryx APA Platform, where it is transformed, analyzed, and then pushed back out to Tableau for visualization. This partnership and implementation of the Alteryx APA Platform in combination with Tableau automated processes allowing insight for action in minutes, proving exponential value to the Castor business and the medical researchers that Castor works with.
Operational Impact
  • The implementation of the Alteryx APA Platform in combination with Tableau has significantly improved the efficiency of data analysis at Castor. The manual process of merging complex data from multiple sources and running analyses, which used to take at least 5 days, was automated, allowing for near real-time data analysis. This was crucial in the face of the worsening coronavirus pandemic, where the need for quick insights was paramount. The democratization of data was highlighted, with the importance of data in our lives being brought to the forefront. The ability to quickly tell a cohesive story from data and then visualize that story was seen as ground-breaking. The partnership with The Information Lab, Netherlands, and the successful implementation of the Alteryx APA Platform has set a powerful example amidst the global crisis.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Reduced the manual meta-analysis process from 5 days to 5 minutes
  • Used by over 50,000 researchers in 90 countries
  • Supported more than 4,100 commercial and academic studies

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