The Future of Advanced Analytics in Clinical Research Medidata Solutions

Over the last few decades, the stream of data available to life sciences companies has grown from a trickle to a tidal wave: genetic and genomic portraits of individual patients, metabolomic and proteomic profiles, real-world data from wearables measuring everything from heart rate variability to blood glucose levels, detailed patient clinical histories from electronic health records. The total volume of health data in the world is expected to soar to 2,314 exabytes by 2020, 15 times what it was in 2013. By some estimates, if this data were stored in a stack of tablet computers, the stack would reach 82,000 miles high. Data analysis has flourished, too. Alongside classical statistics, powerful artificial intelligence technologies have emerged that can manipulate massive numbers of inputs and curate data stored in non-standard formats--take, for instance, the more than 700 different ways researchers have historically recorded gender in clinical trials.