Nova Scotia Health launches pilot program with MDClone New Partnership improves patient care by giving researchers better, more efficient health data access

Nova Scotia Health is partnering with MDClone – a global data analytics and synthetic data company – to enable quick access for clinicians to health data while maintaining the strictest privacy considerations.

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A pilot project, driven by Nova Scotia Health’s Innovation Hub, will provide a select group of Nova Scotia Health researchers with access to the MDClone ADAMS Platform. This software helps researchers conduct analysis more efficiently by using synthetic data. The artificially created data replicates the characteristics and correlations of real patient populations while maintaining patient privacy.

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“We are excited to be one of the few health systems in Canada to have access to this technology and to have the opportunity to give Nova Scotia Health researchers and health care teams better access to data that will enable them to transform health care in our province,” said Dr. Gail Tomblin Murphy, Vice-President of Research, Innovation and Discovery and Chief Nurse Executive at Nova Scotia Health.

“Through this test and try, we look forward to learning more about how synthetic data can help support our researchers and health care teams and continue to evolve our culture of innovation.”

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The MDClone ADAMS technology will be available for live use for a cohort of clinicians in Nova Scotia in Spring 2023.

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The ADAMS Platform enables researchers to analyze health outcomes from large synthetic data sets while maintaining key privacy requirements, such as: the number of patients that transition from walk-in clinics to emergency departments within set periods; the number of patients who frequent emergency departments for chronic care; and long-term effects of various prescribing patterns.

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“Like most fields of endeavour, there is a renaissance in medicine regarding better utilization and understanding of data regarding the population we are treating, what we are spending our money on, and what outcomes we are obtaining,” said Dr. Michael Dunbar, Orthopedic surgeon at the Halifax Infirmary and Innovator in Residence with the Nova Scotia Health Innovation Hub.

“Unlike most fields, medicine has special considerations around privacy which introduces unique requirements as to how we approach important but sensitive health-related data,” Dr. Dunbar said. “Partnering with MDClone offers a unique opportunity to better understand health outcomes while still respecting data privacy. This is an important step forward to improving our health care system because if you can’t measure it, you can’t change it.”

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“We are thrilled to partner with Nova Scotia Health to help build an integrated learning health system and increase data democratization,” said Ziv Ofek, Co-Founder and CEO of MDClone. “Together, we will transform the health care ecosystem in Nova Scotia by accelerating collaboration, innovation, and improvement in quality and operations for Nova Scotia Health by way of our synthetic data and self-service data analytics tools.”