MediSci’s Platform Leverages Amazon QLDB to Bridge the Gap Between Healthcare and Life Science Product Development

It’s no secret that health and life sciences industry is ripe for technological innovation.

Today, when a patient receives a diagnosis and recommendation for treatment, what is hidden behind the scenes is a number of complex processes. Frontline healthcare and life science product development are two major industries that help deliver effective patient care, but are also at the center of this complexity.

Frontline healthcare focuses on diagnosing, treating, and preventing disease, while life science product development creates, produces, and markets treatments. When operating and communicating efficiently, these two functions (frontline healthcare and product development) work in tandem to create better health outcomes for patients. That said, the reality today is that the two functions lack the ability to effectively collaborate, a problem that MediSci is confronting head-on by leveraging Amazon Quantum Ledger Database (QLDB).

Florianne Reynoso, CEO, and Justin Davis, COO of MediSci decided to build a solution after having managed over 300 clinical trials, placing their core expertise in life science product development. Additionally, the team they’ve brought together also has extensive experience in frontline healthcare, giving them over 50 years of combined experience in both arenas. MediSci partnered with Povio Labs, a San Francisco design and development firm with a development team in Slovenia, on the design and implementation of the system.

Florianne Reynoso,                  CEO of MediSci

Reynoso summarizes MediSci’s mission: “We are using Amazon QLDB to provide a secure and verifiable transaction log to help streamline the cumbersome and costly drug, biologic, device development, and FDA approval processes, all in an effort to create transparency between life science companies and frontline healthcare providers. Better healthcare outcomes will come as a result of closing the gap between these two industries. Our QLDB-based platform will provide a secure, immutable, and verifiable transaction log to simplify data verification and reduce counterparty risk. We see the future of medicine being a collaborative network of players providing proven data for real-time analytics, leading to individualized diagnosis and treatment, and improving population healthcare outcomes.”

Along with the benefit of offering a centralized, transparent platform for inter-industry communication, MediSci sees huge implications for clinical trials, per Davis. “In the clinical trial industry, 1% of data fraud can destroy an entire trial. We need a triple ledger system that will self-authenticate data in real time and garner us the ability to use meaningful artificial intelligence. We looked into various blockchains, but the response times were inadequate for the desired performance. This is why we decided to build a layered system on top of QLDB, which enabled us to fill the gap and build the bridge between drug development and the healthcare provider. QLDB accelerates our operations in addition to offering an immutable log that audits data in real time.”

Once implemented, the startup envisions a world where pharmaceutical companies will conduct virtual trials and eliminate onsite visits to verify data, making it more cost and time effective to develop therapies. Providers using the system can then focus on the newly created highways of information that will empower precision medicine.

In MediSci’s architecture outlined in the below diagram, all transactions from our web app and mobile app get stored in QLDB first. They then use QLDB streams to stream the transactions to Amazon Kinesis to get additionally stored in an Amazon Aurora database for quick read only access by the web app and mobile app. Any future transaction for the same item (i.e. updates, deletes) will update authoritative state in QLDB first so they can see the audit history of any transaction going all the way back in time and take full advantage of the immutability of the QLDB Journal to prevent any fraudulent activity.

The everyday value in the ability of MediSci’s QLDB-based platform to bridge this gap is found in enhancing patient health outcomes, as Reynoso puts it. “Chronic diseases such as high blood pressure, diabetes, and obesity consume a large majority of a primary physician’s time and energy, and account for 3/4 of US healthcare spending.” The team at MediSci approaches management of chronic disease through their platform from a clinical research perspective, using data in QLDB and applying the rigorous methodology and measurements of clinical research to everyday healthcare.

Michael Morelock, MD, who heads up the physician team at MediSci, not only sees benefits for the patient, but also in operationalizing a process for connecting clinical trials with physicians in the community. “MediSci’s integrated ecosystem using QLDB is supporting a physician-friendly EHR dashboard that works behind the scenes and requires little additional documentation or administrative burden. We also plan on collaborating with large healthcare systems who have done extensive work in chronic are management, bringing them together with community-based physicians to find the best participants for clinical trials.”

MediSci’s solution and value proposition for filling the gap and accelerating the connection between frontline healthcare and life science product development is a collaborative effort to develop technology based on secure and immutable data in QLDB. Looking ahead, the team will be developing a business model that delivers these solutions to consumers, and creates a value network that profits from keeping patients healthy.