Last week, ONTOFORCE, claimed the first spot in the ‘Digital Health’ category at the EIT Health Summit in Barcelona, for which it receives €25,000. In addition, ONTOFORCE came third in the public vote. EIT Health is a European institute that stimulates innovation and entrepreneurship in healthcare.
The fast-growing Flemish start-up owes its prize to its flagship product, DISQOVER, which can quickly link several types of data silos within biotech, pharma and patient records. Hans Constandt, ONTOFORCE’s founder and CEO, is very pleased: “The jury’s praise was tremendous. They recognize that we can solve the current issue of data variance and combining data from several silos as quickly and smartly as possible. Also, this is not test software, but an actual, working application.”
Accelerating research
ONTOFORCE’s DISQOVER platform is being used by customers in healthcare to aggregate and visualize data from a wide range of sources. It takes into account search results’ context and relevance, and it also attempts to glean the user’s search intentions. In this way, unexpected search results can come up, search tracks become more complete and innovation within pharma companies can be accelerated.
“Big pharma has a dazzling amount of data and sources,” Mr. Constandt explains, “sifting through these mountains of information can take up a lot of time and can burn out even the most motivated researcher. With DISQOVER, it’s possible to learn if some trains of thought had been examined before and see what their results were. As such, researchers gain valuable time.”
Mr. Constandt started developing DISQOVER in 2011, when a search for relevant medical information concerning a health issue of his son was going very difficult.
EIT Health (European Institute for Innovation & Technology in Health) supports innovative, young enterprises and is a collaboration of 140 partners and institutions. ONTOFORCE’s prize was the end result of a project where hundreds of companies all over Europe were eligible to participate.
