Sidra Medicine and its digital transformation journey with the cloud

Sidra Medicine is an academic research hospital that strives to provide a personalized approach to healthcare for Women and Children. “We are one of the few hospitals in the world, with an established research facility where clinical, biomedical and scientific research collaborations are embedded in the patient care journey. We wanted a trusted technology partner, that would enable our multi-disciplinary clinical research teams to use genome analysis and gain a 360-degree view of the patient, leading to a more informed diagnosis.  We also want to scale up our genomics research capabilities to meet growing local and global demands and achieve our digital transformation goals,” explains Dr. Khalid Fakhro, Chief Research Officer and Chair of the Precision Medicine Program at Sidra Medicine.

As a cutting-edge research center, Sidra Medicine constantly adopts cutting-edge technologies to collaborate with researchers from around the globe. “We used to work with on-premises data centers, resulting in limited access to data, and also raising privacy and security concerns,” says Dr. Rashid Niaz, Director of Medical Informatics & Clinical Decision Support at Sidra Medicine. “Whenever we have visiting international scholars, setting up their collaborative work environments took months as this included planning, uploading data, granting remote data access, and doing security checks. To keep up with our workloads, we needed a scalable, secure and fast infrastructure.”

Bringing speed, security, and scalability

To facilitate data analysis and collaboration with international researchers, Sidra Medicine deployed specific solutions in partnership with Microsoft. The first was a centralized data warehouse for Power BI, enabling the institution to generate analytical reports from any data stored in the warehouse. "Thanks to the platform, our research partners and collaborators from Australia and Germany, can now come together and compare their data to ours and generate new findings.”

Fostering collaboration and innovation

Today, Sidra Medicine offers its team and international collaborators more convenient and faster access to data, research, analytics capabilities, and insights. “Thanks to Microsoft, we can deliver our solutions—like PRIME, a platform for securely enrolling patients in studies, and Honest Broker, a system for data anonymization—30 to 45 percent faster,” says Dr. Niaz. “And because Microsoft collaborates with many medical facilities, it automatically applies ISO standards and HIPAA laws, which makes it easier for us to ensure privacy and security. This gives credibility to trust our partners and collaborators, who can feel confident that our data is secured to world-class standards.”