Reltio releases 2018 version of its Big Data platform

Reltio, a Silicon Valley IT firm deeply engaged in Big Data technology, popped up in life sciences applications needing better master data management (MDM). A key objective was the work necessary to meet compliance with the Physicians Sunshine Act, matching pharma’s payments to healthcare providers with rock-solid demographic data on those physicians. Since then, Reltio has broadened its client base to retail, media businesses, financial services and healthcare generally, while advancing its technology platform, originally called Reltio Cloud. IT and business-analytics departments in pharma are the ones who pay most attention to Big Data technology providers like Reltio, but commercial and marketing managers should pay attention too: Reltio is a core functionality of the Orchestrated Customer Experience, a customer-engagement platform just launched by IQVIA; and Reltio continues to develop specialized implementations of its technology, such as for key opinion-leader management, managed market affiliations and clinical trial coordination.

Now, with Reltio 2018, the company is promoting what it calls the Self-Learning Data Platform, a capability to curate and quality-check incoming data (a trivial example: dealing with a physician name that shows up in multiple locations and with multiple affiliations). Data cleansing and creating suitable interfaces for data from different sources is an onerous task for Big Data projects; this machine-learning capability is intended to alleviate that.

Other new or enhanced features include IQ Export, a speedup for downloading analytics results from the massive databases that Reltio taps into; and IQ Console, an enhanced dashboard for managing Reltio applications, and a user-interface modeling function, to tailor output reporting. Reltio has also made accommodations for something only at the periphery of multinational pharma data management at this time: the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), meant to tighten consumers’ control over their digital identity (and which includes a “right to forget” to expunge data), and the IDMP (ID for Medicinal Products) a broad-based effort to categorize product data and product attributes, which will impact clinical trial work initially. GDPR is supposed to begin going into effect in May.