For years, we’ve heard the same challenge voiced across advanced analytics teams in biopharma: while most are staffed for predictive modeling and rigorous causal inference, in reality, these teams spend 80% of their time on data preparation. This work is tedious and poses a major bottleneck to evidence generation, as programmers and analysts spend the bulk of their hours on bespoke data wrangling instead of the high-value analysis that drives drug development. 

In one common scenario, writing a query to identify incident diabetes patients and capture their drug use and outcomes over time can require 8,000 lines of code, nearly 7,200 of which require bespoke data engineering. For any new dataset or new question, this process starts from scratch.

This inefficiency is compounded by a disconnect between coding and no-code teams. When non-coding stakeholders build protocols or definitions, there is no straightforward way to audit the technical work that follows from analytics teams. The result is a time-consuming, highly error-prone translation between the two functions.

Activate, the latest application for the RWE enterprise from Aetion, a Datavant Company, is designed to overcome these inefficiencies and empower analytics groups to focus their time and expertise on the analytical challenges that matter most. As the newest addition to Aetion’s portfolio of applications—including Discover, Substantiate, and Generate—Activate unlocks new capabilities across flexible data transformation, advanced analytics integrations, and a best-in-class user experience for collaborative, reproducible coding.

A sneak peek inside Activate: Accelerate and simplify your analytics

Powered by the foundational science of Aetion Evidence Platform®, Activate is a workbench application for biostatisticians, data scientists, and analysts who need to implement analyses and models flexibly and efficiently in code. It also serves data providers who are pressured to clear feasibility backlogs and deliver data to customers in a usable, custom format.

Activate introduces several core functions to accelerate and standardize your work. Measures allow you to create standardized, organization-wide definitions of variables, from simple events to complex sequences and algorithms. Compared to writing SQL pipelines, Measures are reusable, flexible, faster to implement, and less prone to error. Powering all of Aetion’s software tools, Measures simplify complex variable definitions and make them accessible to any user. These can be used across projects, teams, and applications across the Aetion Evidence Platform.

With Data Views, you can prepare data for analysis at any level—patient, event, patient-day, provider, site, and more—with built-in guardrails, entirely eliminating tedious query code. The Event View is designed to capture events and their attributes for full explorations and event-level analyses, no matter how niche. Core use cases include complex pregnancy studies supporting regulatory submissions and cost explorations within HEOR. The Patient View helps you measure variables over time, such as for longitudinal analyses, custom cohort builds, or nested trial designs.

Even better, Measures and Data Views can be reused across any dataset and any analysis, essentially serving as knowledge assets to multiply productivity across the enterprise.

Ready to build models or implement the latest statistical methods? Load your data into Workspaces, Activate’s hosted, collaborative programming environments, with added controls and audit trails tracing your work in code and describing it in plain text. Save and lock Outputs with in-built version control to track results over time or trace and reproduce old analyses on old dataset versions.

How does Activate transform your analytics capabilities?

Accelerate time from data to results

Activate addresses the hard, error-prone data preparation work that consumes most programmers’ time, getting teams to insights 80% faster.

• One user said, "Building measure logic for something as simple as Enrollment or observability in SQL is tedious... You have to make sure every day has an event. There are tons of edge cases you might miss—which makes this error-prone. It's easier said than done."
• Data producers and aggregators often face pressure to prepare and sell forms of the data that are “usable” by customers. With Activate, vendors can build and ship enriched, analysis-ready data products, covering the right patients and variables.

 Expand what's possible with analytic flexibility

Activate simplifies complex analytics on any level or unit, enabling methods previously challenging or impossible with RWD analytics tools. As one user said, "This expands beyond even [patient-level] analysis, with the Event View. You can do a lot like event-level analyses and explorations — even pregnancy studies."

 Unite code and no-code stakeholders

Activate brings diverse RWE teams together, providing a common platform for seamless collaboration across the enterprise.

• No-code users can make definitions that can be drawn directly into code and audit coded work using auto-generated plain-text descriptions. 
• Programmers can prepare data quickly and collaborate with non-coding teammates.
• Epidemiologists using Aetion® Substantiate can use custom cohorts built by Activate users in downstream no-code analyses. 

 Guarantee reproducibility

A first-in-class tool, Activate brings audit trails and collaboration to free-form RWE analyses. 

• Results are stored and shared with all their inputs, including dataframes, scripts, and a plain-text log of definitions and decisions.
• Automated version control ensures you can reproduce any old analysis in minutes, despite updates to the underlying data.

Ready to see Activate in action?

Request a demo to learn how Activate can empower your organization at every level—from programmer to enterprise