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IBM > Case Studies > Finding cures faster by transforming big data into valuable clinical insight
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Finding cures faster by transforming big data into valuable clinical insight

Technology Category
  • Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
  • Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics
Applicable Industries
  • Healthcare & Hospitals
Applicable Functions
  • Product Research & Development
Use Cases
  • Predictive Maintenance
  • Predictive Quality Analytics
Services
  • Data Science Services
The Challenge
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) supports and conducts vital medical research. However, it was facing challenges in helping scientists find rapid answers to research questions and drive treatment breakthroughs. The NIH collects vast quantities of data from patients who volunteer to participate in clinical trials at the NIH Clinical Center. The insights hidden within this wealth of information could hold the key to advancing medical research and enhancing patient care, but only if researchers are able to access and analyze the data. As technological and scientific advances increase the scale and pace of medical research, NIH must work to provide scientists with even faster insight into ever-increasing data volumes. A few years ago, the NIH Clinical Center realized that the volume and complexity of data threatened to outstrip the capacity of its existing systems.
About The Customer
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) is the nation’s medical research agency, made up of 27 Institutes and Centers. It is part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and is the largest source of funding for medical research in the world, supporting thousands of scientists across America and around the globe. Every day, vast quantities of data are collected from patients who volunteer to participate in clinical trials at the NIH Clinical Center – America’s largest research hospital. The insights hidden within this wealth of information could hold the key to advancing medical research and enhancing patient care, but only if researchers are able to access and analyze the data.
The Solution
NIH is helping researchers unlock new insights from decades of data, using the IBM® PureData® System. Today, research teams can run queries on patient data in seconds, rather than minutes or hours, helping them conduct more thorough experiments and find more accurate answers to research questions. These insights can be used to uncover new patterns of disease and effective treatments, improving patient care and potentially saving lives. The NIH worked to supercharge the performance of its BTRIS applications, introducing the IBM PureData System for Analytics, powered by Netezza® technology. Today, researchers can run analyses on large, complex data sets and generate reports faster than ever before. Some queries that took up to five minutes to run now take just five seconds.
Operational Impact
  • Researchers can run queries on big volumes of data in seconds, rather than minutes.
  • Research teams can run and re-run queries, and have the ability to look at data in many different ways.
  • Improving BTRIS performance has opened up new opportunities for NIH researchers, allowing them to access and analyze data that was previously unavailable.
Quantitative Benefit
  • Some queries that took up to five minutes to run now take just five seconds.
  • When the NIH Clinical Center added genomic data, the size of the repository grew from 5 billion to 16 billion rows of data.

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