A Vancouver startup with some serious supercomputing credentials behind it has partnered with SAP AG (NYSE:SAP), a global leader in enterprise software, to bring big data analysis to health care and medical research.
The partnership between Phemi Health Systems and SAP AG was announced December 5 at the Data Effect conference in Vancouver.
The conference focused on using big data and other technology to transform health care and medical research, including genomics analysis for personalized medicine.
Phemi was founded less than a year ago year by Paul Terry, who also founded Abatis Systems – acquired by Redback Networks for $1.3 billion in 2001. Terry later founded OctigaBay Systems, a supercomputing company that was acquired by Cray Inc. in 2004.
"The world of big data, we've been doing it for a decade," Terry told Business in Vancouver.
Under the partnership with SAP, Phemi will provide the big data management expertise and SAP will provide the analytics to provide a secure system that will give doctors and researchers access to massive amounts of patient data and medical research.
"This suddenly puts in front of people the ability to do things they probably haven't even dreamed of, and it changes the way you do research," said Dinesh Sharma, SAP's vice president of corporate innovation.
"It's an ability for researchers to be able to query certain types of data but to do that very, very quickly, but to also do it by respecting privacy."
One of the barriers to using patient medical data is protecting personal information, something Phemi addresses with "privacy by design," which allows users – hospitals and health ministries, for example – to authorize who can access the data.
Since every jurisdiction may have different laws regarding access to patient information and medical research, the Phemi system allows that access to be customized according to the local laws of the land and an organization's own guidelines.
"We've solved the privacy compliance governance issue," Terry said. "We can create a view on data that conforms to whatever standards you want and we can organize and analyze data any way you want to."
Phemi will be using SAP's HANA system, an "in-memory" computing system that is orders of magnitude faster than traditional computers and allows for massive amounts of data to be analyzed in real time.
"We do a lot of the heavy lifting," Sharma said. "These are things they don't have to reinvent the wheel on."
