Deloitte’s MyPath Uses AWS to Enable Decentralized Clinical Trials at Scale

Clinical trials struggle to recruit and retain patients; challenges include difficulties in traveling to sites, confusion about treatment protocols, and ability to access medical teams in real time. These challenges have only worsened with the COVID-19 pandemic.

MyPath for Clinical, part of Deloitte’s ConvergeHEALTH product suite, enables decentralized trials by meeting patients where they are, providing them with a simple interface in the form of a mobile app that allows them to report data remotely in real time. MyPath for Clinical can also be used to securely and compliantly disseminate personalized information to patients and can even use behavior insights to send patients notifications and “nudges” to encourage protocol adherence. It also helps patients connect with their care team should questions come up. The platform utilizes mobile devices and sensors to collect data through a modular plug-and-play ecosystem. As a result, patients can significantly reduce their visits to medical sites and more quickly access their medical support team. The data captured can help reduce protocol deviations and potentially provide early detection of adverse events. MyPath for Clinical reduces staffing burdens, encourages more patients to enroll and stay in trials, and, by enabling remote data capture, increases access among underserved neighborhoods.

Operating on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) serverless architecture, MyPath for Clinical moves clinical trial data reporting into the cloud with global scalability. The AWS-supported platform “supports deep and robust analytics, identified and deidentified,” says Chris Zant, chief digital officer for ConvergeHEALTH. “It enables all those different data elements and all those different experiences to be used to support a more productive and a more bountiful trial with better results and better participation.” 

With the breadth of HIPAA-eligible services available from AWS, ConvergeHEALTH was able to build a regulatory-compliant architecture with Amazon Cognito, AWS Identity and Access Management (AWS IAM), AWS Key Management Service (AWS KMS), and AWS Certificate Manager that enables sensitive personal health information to reside locally in a highly secure and compliant environment. The MyPath for Clinical mobile app interacts using the Amazon API Gateway, utilizing AWS Lambda and Amazon Aurora to create a microservices architecture. Amazon Kinesis and AWS Lambda are used for monitoring and analytics and feed into the ConvergeHEALTH Miner analytic store. Supported by Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), ConvergeHEALTH Miner enables insights and analytics from longitudinal patient records.