THOUGHT LEADERSHIP
DATA & ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE How the COVID-19 pandemic fast-tracked an already existing trend By Denise Holzer
THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC HAS RAPIDLY ACCELERATED A DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION WITHIN OUR SOCIETY
Denise Holzer Managing Director at Chatsworth Securities, LLC Inc. a Greenwich, CT based investment bank. Ms. Holzer is a Technology, Artificial Intelligence & E-commerce expert, with operational experience working at technology start-ups. She Co-Founded Crunchet, a new app positioned to be a leading global social community in the growing cross-over between Esports, Sports, Entertainment & Social Impact. Prior to joining Chatsworth, she spent over a decade at Morgan Stanley. She is a graduate of Tufts University and serves on the board of the American Society of the University of Haifa. dholzer@chatsworthgroup.com
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The COVID pandemic has rapidly accelerated a digital transformation within our society. The crisis not only highlighted substantial complications in the monitoring of medicine and analysis of healthcare data, but also disrupted a steady flow of goods and services. This exposed many outdated business models and supply chains. In far too many instances during the pandemic, businesses had to reassess plans, profit forecasts, and balance sheets. The ongoing stress has many companies searching for better ways to unlock unvalued or undervalued business assets in order to fuel transformation and new business models. Chief among these valuable assets are corporate data, human intelligence and combinations of both. REAL WORLD BIG DATA FOR CLINICAL RESEARCH AND DRUG DEVELOPMENT The global pandemic and the crisis that followed has greatly increased the need for anonymized patient data in the already established and growing demand from clinical research and drug development. Anonymized data means encrypting personal data or eliminating identifiable information so that the collected data source is untraceable. COVID has resulted in exponential growth of empirical research that relies on big data and the need for high-volume, routinely collected
specialized and genetic health records. This data, using artificial intelligence to dissect and distill important trends, facts and other information, has the potential to provide valuable insights to assess health conditions like COVID and treatment effectiveness. While a significant portion of the healthcare data in the world resides within hospital networks, hospital margins are razor thin, making internal investments in data infrastructure difficult. Companies like Syndesis Health, a client of our firm, is a global market leader in utilizing data trust technology to anonymize health data with government grade security. They are moving fast to help hospitals market and monetize the data by licensing anonymized patient records to clinical research and pharma companies. Syndesis Health creates a solution for companies with valuable data by taking on the expense to migrate the data and then share in a percentage of the resulting revenue with the hospital, its client. Kamil Mehmood, a Director at Syndesis Health, says “The future of healthcare will be data driven. The ability to safely and securely leverage anonymized health data is enabling a rapid acceleration in the development of new innovations that improve health outcomes.” Mehmood adds, “at Syndesis Health, not only are we focused on making this data available for research, but we are also focused on ensuring that the economic benefits created from its use are shared with the hospital networks that are making it possible.”
