Aridhia announces revolutionary mini-app technology to accelerate clinical application development following RStudio collaboration

EDINBURGH, UNITED KINGDOM - Jul 9, 2015 - Aridhia, the pioneering clinical and translational informatics company, today announced a revolutionary “mini-app” rapid development solution specifically for clinical applications. The solution integrates the RStudio Shiny web application framework and Shiny Server Pro secure, performant application deployment platform to enhance AnalytiXagility’s collaborative workspaces.   

All too often the translation of healthcare applications into clinical practice fails due to a breakdown in communication between the data scientists that build analytic models, and the clinical practitioners who consume them.

Chris Roche, CEO at Aridhia, says: “Within one of our collaborative workspaces, any member of a multidisciplinary team, no matter what their role is, will now be able to easily interact with their data - and each other - without the need to understand advanced analytics.”

Aridhia’s new ‘mini-app’ rapid prototyping capability embeds RStudio’s Shiny reactive data visualisation technology into the company’s AnalytiXagility platform, enabling multidisciplinary teams to accelerate the development and deployment of analytically-driven clinical applications. 

Data scientists will now be able to rapidly build interactive, visual ‘apps’, bringing their analysis and data to life, and allowing the rest of their multidisciplinary team to interact with data early in the development lifecycle through an incredible visual experience.

This means for the first time, highly-targeted, prototype healthcare applications can be developed and validated in a matter of hours, rather than weeks.

Roche says: “This morning I asked one of our data scientists to upload a prescribing data set into a workspace. By lunchtime I had several mini-apps in place which I can use to visualise the data in multiple ways at an afternoon meeting. Previously this would have meant several different requests, and a long wait, but now I can interact with the data much more quickly - and without the need for advanced analytic skills.” 

The healthcare industry is a late and slow adopter of technology, which means that innovations are much slower to disseminate than in other industries. Aridhia believes that a technology-enabled innovation pipeline is critical to facilitating increased collaboration to foster the next generation of patient care innovations, as well as promoting long-term economic growth and healthcare benefits.

Combining the power of R, an advanced analytics language, with modern web technologies, such as Shiny, will allow healthcare and research organisations to exploit the information revolution at a rapid rate.

This is the first time that the Edinburgh-based company Aridhia and RStudio, the Boston company behind free and open source tools for users of the R programming language, have worked together.

The collaboration announcement comes as Aridhia launches the latest version of AnalytiXagility.

“We’re absolutely delighted to see how Aridhia has integrated Shiny and Shiny Server Pro into its clinical solution,” said Tareef Kawaf, president of RStudio.

“The importance of data science in healthcare is gaining greater awareness. Tools that enable the sharing and understanding of the analytical models to the widest possible audience have become more important than ever before.” 

 “We enjoy seeing what the community can achieve with R,” continued Kawaf. “The combination of open technologies which Aridhia has embedded into AnalytiXagility, including R and Shiny, mean that it’s rapidly becoming a crucial component of multidisciplinary, collaborative clinical research and innovation delivery, which can have a significant impact on patient care. We are truly proud to be part of this effort.” 

This latest version of Aridhia’s platform meets two important objectives - delivering a more comprehensive suite of analytic tools to support multidisciplinary research teams, and adding new information governance features that give stakeholders increased control of their data by logging all activity connected to workspaces.

This is Aridhia’s first collaboration with RStudio but the latest in a number of pioneering collaborations. Recently, the company announced its partnership with fellow Scottish health tech company Craneware to target the US market, and last year it announced its membership of the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health. Aridhia’s data science platform underpins the world-leading Stratified Medicine Scotland Innovation Centre (SMS-IC). 

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About Aridhia Informatics

Aridhia is a world-leading clinical and translational informatics company developing technology and capability that accelerates the translation of precision medicine and biomedical research into clinical practice. Operating internationally on projects in Australia, England, Scotland and Kuwait, Aridhia works closely with governments, health organisations, research collaborations and academic institutions.

Aridhia was co-founded in 2007 by Dr David Sibbald a software entrepreneur, philanthropist and Vice-President of UK UNICEF, the United Nations children's fund, and Professor Andrew Morris, Chief Scientist for Health in Scotland and Professor of Medicine, Director of the Institute of Population Heath Sciences and Informatics, and Vice-Principal of the University for Data Science at the University of Edinburgh.

Based in Edinburgh and Glasgow, Aridhia has a 60-strong multidisciplinary team of data scientists, information governance specialists, computer scientists, software developers and healthcare experts.