Seeking Insights into Rare Diseases, Pfizer Scales AI Analytics Platform

Pfizer Inc.'s recently-built analytics platform is helping employees from different divisions within the company collaborate in an effort to identify patients with rare diseases that might previously have gone undiagnosed, company executives said. With the help of machine-learning algorithms, the analytics platform is now yielding new insights that were previously difficult to identify in a short amount of time because there too many disparate datasets to sift through. The cloud-based Virtual Analytics Workbench tool officially launched in 2017 and more than 350 employees are using it including mainly data analysts and research and development teams. The goal is to scale it more broadly across different departments. "While data science is a critical skill set in our company, you don't need a mathematician or data science expert to use (it)," said Jeff Keisling, Pfizer's chief information officer, in an email.