CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– InterSystems, a creative data technology provider dedicated to helping customers solve the most critical scalability, interoperability, and speed problems, today announced that InterSystems IRIS for Health™ is now recognized as a data platform for i2b2 (Informatics for Integrating Biology & the Bedside) alongside Postgres, MS SQL, and Oracle. A data platform specifically engineered to extract value from healthcare data, InterSystems IRIS for Health will support the i2b2 community to improve research workflows and performance outcomes.
Prior to the creation of i2b2, clinical research data management was a manual process. Because of that, data was often very siloed, which meant research needed to be conducted based on data available at a single research site. Developed as an open-source resource kit, i2b2 helped break down those barriers and has made it possible to find patients that fit study criteria across many sites, independent of their location, improving collaboration and lessening interoperability gaps in the process.
“With more than 100 large research institutions around the world using i2b2 technology, the global i2b2 research community has led many large-scale clinical research efforts, including those of COVID-19,” said Qi Li, MD, physician executive at InterSystems, who also serves on the i2b2 tranSMART foundation board. “However, research communities still look for solutions that can accelerate clinical trial recruitment and real-world evidence development.”
With support from InterSystems implementation partner First Line Software, a premier provider of software engineering, enablement, and digital transformation advisory services, InterSystems IRIS for Health will modernize the capabilities of i2b2. With InterSystems IRIS for Health, the i2b2 community and clinical researchers will be equipped with a modern, intuitive platform to improve researchers’ workflows including:
- FHIR-Based Solution Development — An extensible FHIR repository and comprehensive REST APIs provide the foundation for modern healthcare application development.
- Certified Healthcare Interoperability — Support for FHIR, HL7 V2, IHE, and other standards and protocols to simplify and automate data capture and refresh processes for the i2b2 data repository.
- Seamless Data Management — The ability to seamlessly handle multiple forms of data at high speed, with vertical and horizontal scalability. i2b2 researchers can easily manage genomic data, high-frequency medical devices, or wearable data, and use InterSystems IRIS NLP to extract information from unstructured text.
- Open Analytics — The choice of embedded, standards-based, and best-of-breed analytics technologies for exploration, analysis, and prediction using InterSystems IRIS technology such as IntegratedML and Python integration.
“When it comes to clinical research, connecting patient data from a wide range of healthcare organizations and creating a single source of truth is essential,” said Scott Gnau, Head of Data Platforms at InterSystems. “With the help of InterSystems IRIS for Health, the i2b2 community will be equipped with more than just a database of information, but a variety of capabilities that allow researchers to extract actionable data in real-time for a more intuitive and seamless experience.”
