Castor

How does Castor's technology support the fight against Covid-19?

Before I launched Castor, it was clear to me that medical research and evidence-based medicine were not making optimal use of data. Decisions were still too often made based on paper documents, spreadsheets or free text publications. I wanted to do something about that. At Castor, we envision a future where all medical research data is machine-readable, reusable and available to everyone to improve patient outcomes.

When new virus strains such as coronavirus emerge, data is clearly our most valuable asset. This was true during the Ebola outbreak, where we had decades of research on effects and possible treatments, and it is doubly true in the case of coronavirus.

Castor's research EDC platform is available free of charge to all Covid-19 research projects. We now support more than 200 Covid-19 studies in 16 countries. And because time is of the essence, we ensured that these studies could go live within an average of six days. We developed pre-built electronic case report forms (eCRFs) based on World Health Organization (WHO) standards to help researchers get their study or registry up and running in less than an hour.

How does Tableau fit into this Covid-19 study?

One of the best ways to maximize the impact of data is through visual analysis. And no one does that better than Tableau. Tableau was the first choice to support our Covid-19 program. Easy to use and incredibly powerful, it allows people to understand research findings significantly faster and more efficiently.

Can you give an example of Covid-19 research and how Tableau is used?
Castor has provided its EDC platform free of charge for any nonprofit research related to Covid-19. And Tableau is an integral part of that. This is especially true in the case of the Covid Predict study, a collaboration between physicians and researchers in the Netherlands to better understand and predict which Covid-19 patients should receive which treatment and type of care. We optimize the allocation of limited hospital resources and ensure that the most seriously ill patients receive the highest level of care.

Our EDC system helps the Covid Predict consortium easily capture data from multiple sources - it currently includes more than five million data points. Algorithms for predicting disease outcomes are created and tested with data retrieved in real-time through Castor's API, which enables integration with a wide range of other platforms. These algorithms help predict the likelihood that a patient will need intensive care, and if so, what the likely outcome will be.

Tableau allows people to understand all this quickly and easily. It provides an overview of admissions to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU), medium care unit and hospital wards, and visualizes patient outcomes and complications. For example, one crucial dashboard shows the demographic age profile of admissions, the average length of admission and the number of individuals discharged from the hospital, admitted to the hospital, transferred, receiving palliative care or sadly deceased.

This is remarkable and valuable work.

What role did Tableau partner ddbm (Previously: The Information Lab Netherlands play in supporting these projects?

All of this has been made possible through the trusted collaboration with Tableau, DDBM's expertise, and Alteryx. So in just a few days, The Information Lab created these incredibly powerful visualizations, which ultimately help reduce crowding in hospitals, protect staff and prioritize patients who need to be admitted to the hospital.

How important is it for healthcare providers to become more data-driven?

Everyone needs to come together with a shared mission to see data as a reliable commodity. Once data can circulate freely among researchers, clinicians and others, for example, it becomes possible to shorten research cycles and improve health care outcomes.