Ledidi is Revolutionising Data Collaboration in Health Tech

The Norwegian technology startup, Ledidi, is aiming to ­revolutionise the way data is processed in clinical research. Their all-in-one cloud ­solution addresses a wide range of research ­collaboration and data ­management problems that everyone in clinical research is familiar with.

The field of big data analytics in healthcare is constantly evolving.

When researchers conduct a clinical study, they collect a wide range of important information about patients. Doctors and medical researchers now have more clinical survey data at their fingertips than ever before, but many doctors and scientists feel they are not getting the most out of the information available to them.

Einar Martin Aandahl, one of the five co-founders of Ledidi – a Norwegian startup that aims to help hospital personnel and researchers manage, organise and analyse real time data – has this to say about the problem:

”When information is collected about patients at hospitals, it is stored in databases where it cannot be monitored, so it needs to be extracted to an external application – like Excel or a software built for analytics. The constant transportation of the data, and the lengthy, bureaucratic measures it involves might reduce the data’s quality and impose security and privacy challenges.”

Ledidi has created an all-in-one cloud solution for real time collaboration in clinical research to reduce the ­time-consuming and burdensome process. It is called ­PRJCTS, and it allows users to collect, analyse and present data all in one place.

Whether it is a small group of researchers or an entire public sector, they can manage and grant people access to the group of clinical registers that they desire. In this way, everyone can benefit from this collaboration and collect the data they require.

“To give you an idea of how efficient these new integrated solutions are, you can search our data pool and find subpopulations and subgroups in just a few minutes. This is especially important in the field of personalised medicine, because we can ensure the quality of patient care any­where in the healthcare sector,” Aandahl says.

With PRJCTS, the entire workflow – from data collection to graphic production – is packed into a unified plug-and-play system. Data is secure, and the solution complies with GDPR, HIPAA and EU US Privacy Shield regulations and cannot be accessed by someone who doesn’t have the ­required clearance.

A Team Effort

The five founders of Ledidi also noticed the need for a safe platform in data management. Aandahl has a back­ground in preclinical research and his co-founder, Kristoffer ­Watten Brudvik, has broad experience with both analysis and ­dealing with large cancer registries at the renowned MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas.

Both founders are researchers and surgeons at Riks­hospitalet in Oslo. In 2015, they developed a platform to be used for locating organs of deceased donors and transplanting them into the best recipient on the waiting list. Their technology increased the chances of a successful transplantation, and the life expectancy of the transplanted ­organ in the recipient. Today, this is the platform used for the allocation of all transplantable organs in Norway.

Aandahl and Brudvik began developing the PRJCTS solution in 2016. They partnered up with three IT-engineers for this project and today they can offer the only cloud-based system that is capable of handling the vast number of research projects and real time data records legally and securely.

“We were able to develop PRJCTS because of how our expertise in our respective fields complement each other. We are two medical doctors with a solid background in preclinical, clinical and translational research who partnered with highly skilled computer engineers. This collaboration is the main reason for our success,” Aandahl explains.

Born Global

Ledidi was established in Norway and is now entering the Danish, Swedish and US market. The first office outside of Norway was established a month ago in Denmark, where Brudvik had previously been employed.

“Markets in the Scandinavian region are very similar. We understand how the healthcare system works in ­these countries and that the welfare states invest heavily in strengthening this sector. There is no good reason to doubt that Ledidi could become the preferred cloud solution for the health care sector in the entire Scandinavian region,” says Aandahl.

The solution is applicable to a wide range of clinical ­registries, both in research and in quality assurance – whether you are a single user or part of a global multicentre collaboration. For example, because of the Covid-19 pandemic, multidisciplinary teams have an increased need for collecting data with real-time analysis and data presentation, and then sending their results to other hospitals or even countries.
“In conditions like this, having software that can cope with literally thousands of users, and millions of patients is vital – and PRJCTS is designed exactly for this kind of situation,” Brudvik points out.

Right now, multicentre collaboration is complex, time-consuming and requires the use of multiple different software types throughout the data management process. There is a clear need for an intuitive and easy-to-use platform.

This solution has also caught the eye of the insurance industry as it can be used for quality assurance in their ­cooperation with healthcare providers.

The future of Ledidi

Today Ledidi is scaling rapidly in order to meet the growing demands of the market. The solution now also includes ­Ledidi PROMS, a dynamic way to interact with patients’ own perception of their health status.

The company is currently building up support, expanding business development and marketing the next upcoming ­feature, Ledidi TRIALS – a system that aims to solve the complex process in which randomised trials are conducted.

The primary challenge of using cloud solutions is ­keeping data secure and intact.

“Because of the nature and magnitude of the ­challenge, the architecture and choice of technology was extremely important. We actually developed the solution twice from the bottom up because of its complexity,” says Odd Christian Landmark, lead architect and one of the co-founders of Ledidi.