Client story How Vivli Is Enabling Scientific Discoveries to Benefit Global Health

The vision: A global data-sharing and analytics platform to transform medical research

For nonprofit powerhouse Vivli, knowledge is power — and progress.

Clinical trial data in particular is instrumental; it aids researchers with insights that can help develop new therapies, drugs and other treatments. But historically, clinical trial data hasn’t been easy for researchers to access. Hunting down disparate datasets for comparison and further analysis is a lengthy, multitouch process. And requesting access to this sensitive data is notoriously cumbersome.

Vivli’s mission was to change that for good. In 2018, Vivli had been in talks with one of our top strategic partners, Microsoft, to discuss what it would take to build an intuitive data-sharing platform. The platform would provide researchers access to completed clinical trial data submitted by industry and academic researchers across important therapeutic areas including oncology, cardiology, rheumatology and much more.

Envisioning a healthier future

Vivli partnered with Insight from the very beginning to define how its new platform would be distinct from other platforms and applications in medical research. Together we determined that the platform would combine and integrate rich completed and anonymized clinical studies, and prioritized three critical pillars:

Security

Ensuring strong protocols to protect patient privacy

User experience

Building a smooth, intuitive front-end experience for researchers across every touchpoint

Manageability

Simplifying day-to-day management of the platform for peak efficiency on the back end

Executing against these standards would take strategic solutions integration — making Insight Vivli’s partner of choice for the initiative. Insight outlined a strategy for adoption, pulling in a multidisciplinary team spanning security, application development, UX, infrastructure and other key lines of business.

Insight built the entire platform from top to bottom — building and designing the infrastructure, architectures, feature functionality and workflows. We also worked closely with Microsoft Research to bring forward advanced elastic search capabilities through Azure^® Cognitive Search that would integrate seamlessly into Vivli’s platform. With a shared vision for success, our team moved forward with deployment and implementation.

The outcome: A groundbreaking research hub tripling in growth and uniting researchers around the world

Today, Vivli houses clinical trial data from more than 6,700 studies — the result of a steady upward trajectory of 42% growth year over year and 168% overall growth since platform launch. Its loyal user base of researchers is growing at a steady rate, too, averaging 20% growth year over year and 82% overall growth since launch.

Vivli’s founding members included Johns Hopkins University, Harvard University and many industry pharmaceutical companies.

The front-end experience is intuitive and seamless. Researchers easily perform searches to find the studies they are interested in. After requesting access to the data, an approval sequence kicks off to ensure proper usage of the data (hypothesis-driven research, affiliated researchers are employed by labs and universities, etc.). Data is analyzed in a custom research environment built by Insight and housed directly on the Vivli platform. Researchers then submit and request the extraction of their results from the platform, using it to publish a paper in a medical journal.

Built-in reporting and an optimized admin portal have led to drastic time savings for Vivli’s admins — no spreadsheets, disparate email chains or other channels. In fact, Vivli has reported time savings of 35 hours per month on reporting processes. Data on Vivli has been used to design clinical trial protocols and guidelines, and predict therapeutic outcomes and adverse events.

Groundbreaking work on the horizon

Vivli is rapidly building momentum on the platform’s success with new projects. The COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator, for example, is making COVID-19–related clinical trial data more discoverable to improve COVID response.

Another initiative called the Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Register is empowering biopharmaceutical companies to share susceptibility data on infection-causing pathogens. According to Vivli, “This marks a critical step in combating the growing global health threat of antimicrobial resistance…researchers will be able to use the AMR Register to translate masses of antimicrobial resistance surveillance data into meaningful action that saves lives and preserves antibiotics for future generations.”

Insight continues to serve as Vivli’s production and software development arm, partnering closely on upgrades that will drive even more efficiencies and eliminate manual and redundant processes on the back end.

Vivli Executive Director Rebecca Li, PhD, is excited for what the future holds. “The biggest outcome for us has been the result of all the research,” she says. “We’ve had more than 100 scientific publications that have come from the work Vivli has done with researchers.”