

Comprehend releases clinical analytics in the cloud - jakek
http://www.comprehend.com/comprehend-systems-enables-clinical-research-data-analytics-from-the-cloud/

======
c0mpute
Call me an old fart, but I think startups like these are good to have. No
offense to any of the YC founders, but I think the variety of YC companies
that are operating sometimes makes me feel that the "idea bar" is quite low.

Though, I think this EDC/clinical trails data collection is a great place to
innovate in. Having worked as a software engineer in a CRO before, I know how
slow the development lifecycles are and sometimes even the end users are very
slow to adopt. A startup can shake things up by pushing for better data
collection and analysis techniques, more automation as well as better end to
end phase management.

~~~
ryannielsen
FWIW, Comprehend is a YC company – YC W11.

~~~
c0mpute
I actually wrote that knowing very well they are a YC company. What I feel is
that there are some awesome ideas/challenges being worked on by YC companies
and then there are not so inspiring ones. Maybe a dilution due to more
available pool of money.

Somehow I felt YC should only work on really challenging problems, but its a
perception that doesn't lead to profits always :).

------
dmix
The UI of the application in the demo video looks like it was designed by Java
engineers.

Design is still probably not a big selling point in enterprise.

Other than that, I love the business concept.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
Ever heard of Ext-JS?

<http://www.sencha.com/products/extjs/examples/>

~~~
rmorrison
Sencha was an easy choice to get our MVP in the hand of users. We have more
critical features to work on that are orders of magnitude more important to
our users.

~~~
edwinnathaniel
No doubt. I'm on the side of "acceptable UI but provides maximum values
through functionalities".

I used Ext-JS (Ext-GWT) before too on a (failed) startup. I'm not ashamed to
admit that.

------
clebio
I'm surprised to see their example visualizations.[1] They look like the
defaults in Excel's charts, to me, as opposed to some of the other approaches
out there.[2,3] I realize that a lot of their position is unchaining the
carefully controlled medical data sources, but the presentation of that data
is still a big part.

Edit: formatting.

[1]: <http://www.comprehend.com/learn-more/> [2]: <http://d3js.org/> [3]:
<https://mixpanel.com/>

~~~
hariseshadri
I'm a dev at Comprehend and have worked first hand on both the query engine as
well as quite a few of our visualizations.

We strive to generate insightful documents, which provide value beyond default
Excel charts, by providing interactivity which as you pointed out may be
poorly captured in screenshots. With that said, our visualization suite
consists of both graphs made by cutting edge third party charting libraries as
well as in-house custom plots.

On interactivity, three of our most interesting features are drill-down,
dynamic real-time highlights and filtering, and global view synchronization.

Drill-down, or click-through, refers to the ability to look into any given
presented data point to see where it came from. For instance, if you are
plotting the number of medications taken by site, you can right-click on any
point or bar in the chart and see exactly which patients make up that data
point, what the medications were, and even what symptoms those patients were
experiencing. The backing data may come from different tables, different
databases, or even a different type of data store all together (such as a flat
file or SAS data set).

Comprehend also supports dragging a highlight or filter onto any active report
or visualization. Highlights can be generated by the user on the fly; anything
from "males over 60 years old" to a custom R function is fair game. Filters
are functionally equivalent except instead of highlighting data which matches
the predicate, we eliminate data that does not.

The product also supports global applied state, which consists of highlights
and filters, which is automatically applied to all active views. This makes it
easy to look at the same subset of data in different views to help answer
questions and identify trends. We provide other interactive features, such as
intelligent tooltips, various exporting options and view transformations, but
in my opinion these are the most interesting.

It's easy to confuse Comprehend as a general BI or visualization tool.
Although we provide this functionality, the hard tech problem we solve is
answering questions where the data lies in disparate data sources.

This high level of interactivity and ground-up support for multiple data
stores provide value beyond default Excel charting.

~~~
clebio
Thank you for this detailed and thoughtful reply (as compared with downvote
without comment that I got initially from whomever).

Based on your excellent description here, it sounds much more like Tableau and
various other general BI tools (SAS's Visual Analytics, as well), though as
you point out, that isn't Comprehend's objective.

The view synchronization (aka brushing and linking) and real-time sorting,
filtering, and querying are all powerful features and indeed help elucidate
reason from big, noisy data.

In that light, I think Comprehend's 'learn more' page doesn't do any of that
justice. My original comment was my honest impression when looking at the site
for the first time. The light-box style screenshots on each feature encouraged
me to stare at the static UI. I would humbly suggest that it could be reworked
to play up all these technical feats you mention (apropos, Heroku's 'how' page
or this ACM queue article: <http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1805128>,
wherein the examples are all interactive, such as
[http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/files/zoo/ex/stats/parallel.ht...](http://hci.stanford.edu/jheer/files/zoo/ex/stats/parallel.html)).

Though I suspect your potential user base and the buyers probably do get
hands-on demos, so the website's feature page may not be terribly important.
But that's my thoughts. I wish Comprehend the best of success. The work you've
done already is doubtless moving mountains. And assisting health-work is a
stupendous, long-term vision.

~~~
hariseshadri
We absolutely welcome constructive criticism about both our product and how we
portray it. We try to keep our screen shots and website feature listing up to
date, but currently the team is working hard in preparation for our booth at
DIA Philadelphia! Thanks for the well wishes.

------
asdf333
Congratulations guys!!

