Pangaea Data and Microsoft Azure optimize patient care with the help of AI

To provide the most appropriate care for patients, healthcare and pharmaceutical providers must collaborate at scale to characterize patients in a financially sustainable and privacy-preserving manner. This collective effort helps find and connect with suitable patients, allowing them to be matched with therapies and trials, ultimately improving outcomes. However, this collaboration is challenged by strict privacy regulations, which limit partnerships to a project-by-project basis and restrict sharing to de-identified, retrospective datasets only. This challenge combined with the limitations of characterizing patients through manual reviews by clinicians (which has shown to take up to 52% of clinicians’ work days) or by applying technology based on symptoms using natural language processing (NLP) methods, results in high rates of patients reported to be undiagnosed, misdiagnosed or miscoded across hard-to-diagnose conditions, which leads to poor outcomes, heightened costs and inefficiencies across healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Recognizing these challenges, Pangaea Data partnered with Microsoft Azure to ensure that patients’ data stays secure and private, while enabling clinicians from healthcare and pharmaceutical providers to efficiently characterize patients based on their records and clinical guidelines, to discover more patients at scale and direct them for appropriate care involving commercial therapies and clinical trials.

Strategic partnership enabled innovative solution

The primary challenge Pangaea Data faced was how to locally deploy its product for healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies at scale, without transacting data to preserve patient privacy. Hence, Pangaea Data used ARM templates to simplify the deployment of its product behind the firewall of the environment where the data resides, without the need to manage the required infrastructure. Pangaea Data also uses Azure Virtual Machines, Container Instances, Blob Storage, Key Vaults, Microsoft Defender, and Azure Health Data Services for its product development, testing, and deployment which helped ensure the robustness, security, and efficiency of its product. It also uses Text Analytics for Health in Azure AI (Artificial Intelligence) language Services and Open AI to support its product.   

Pangaea Data has partnered with Microsoft since 2021, joining Microsoft for Startups Founders Hub. They are now a part of the Pegasus Program, an invite-only program designed to support enterprise-ready startups connect with customers seeking innovative solutions to solve their business challenges. Through this partnership, Pangaea Data leveraged the Microsoft Commercial Marketplace to scale their go-to-market efforts and create a transactable solution for customers to apply their pre-committed Azure cloud spend to optimize budgets and get faster time-to-value. This status along with Microsoft’s proven track record of ensuring security and privacy when characterizing patients based on large volumes of sensitive patient data, was the catalyst for Pangaea Data to build its solution on Azure, a leading cloud provider. 

So, with a joint global go-to-market co-selling strategy, the Microsoft co-sell program enabled Pangaea Data to work together with Microsoft’s sales organization to rapidly accelerate the sales and usage of Pangaea Data’s novel AI-powered product on Microsoft Azure.

Treating patients efficiently 

Pangaea Data can now easily deploy its product at scale to Microsoft’s Azure network of 140,000 healthcare and pharmaceutical providers without exposing patient data. This results in providing clinicians a single platform for characterizing patients across 7,000 hard-to-diagnose conditions, which helps find more undiagnosed, misdiagnosed and miscoded patients leading to improved patient outcomes, increased revenue, and collaborations. Pharmaceutical sponsors distribute Pangaea Data's capabilities across healthcare providers who are managing their clinical data on Azure thereby allowing them a readout at a global level within 8-10 weeks without the need to: 

• Procure expensive data assets from data aggregators (which are de-identified data assets and not suitable for commercial and clinical trial purposes) 
• Sign individual contracts for each ad hoc project and disease area between healthcare providers and pharmaceutical providers which is not scalable

Partnering with Microsoft and using Azure helped Pangaea Data secure deals on Azure Marketplace with global pharmaceutical companies. For example, Pangaea Data’s product supported the collaboration between two pharmaceutical companies from the US and Japan with the UK’s NHS, to characterize and find 6x (200,000) more cachectic cancer patients compared to ICD search or natural language processing (NLP) approaches. This led to a 6x increase in revenue and suitable patients for trials and new therapies. Simultaneously, this helped the NHS to improve outcomes, halve treatment costs from £10,000 to £5,000 per patient and save £1 billion annually. 

The strategic partnership with Microsoft has helped Pangaea Data connect and build trust with end users from the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries with support from Microsoft account colleagues. Also, Azure has made the deployment of Pangaea Data’s product easy, which helps scale its product across end users who are using Azure and build collaborations between healthcare and pharmaceutical industries without the need to move patient data.

The journey forward

Pangaea Data plans to scale its product further by covering a broader spectrum of diseases and conditions while also continuing to foster financially sustainable and scalable collaborations between healthcare and pharmaceutical providers globally. Azure's capabilities will play a crucial role in realizing Pangaea’s vision by accommodating the increasing demand from healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies for Pangaea’s product and ensure data sovereignty internationally.