{"id":75199,"date":"2021-04-01T10:44:40","date_gmt":"2021-04-01T14:44:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=75199"},"modified":"2025-10-15T10:17:23","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T14:17:23","slug":"alumni-covid-19-data-clients","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/alumni-covid-19-data-clients\/","title":{"rendered":"Carleton Alumni Company Sifting Through COVID-19 Data for Major Health Clients Like World Health Organization"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Carleton Alumni Company Sifting Through COVID-19 Data for Major Health Clients Like World Health Organization\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

When Peter O\u2019Blenis<\/a> was finishing his undergraduate Computer Science<\/a> degree at Carleton University, he knew that he wanted to start a company someday.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cIt\u2019s about building something from scratch,\u201d he says, \u201cand not having any limits \u2014 not having a ceiling over your head.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

That entrepreneurial instinct led O\u2019Blenis to launch a video game business within six months of graduating in 1993 and then, in 2001, to co-found a software firm called TrialStat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Evidence
Evidence Partners CEO Peter O’Blenis<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

TrialStat had two core products: one helped manage clinical data for medical trials and was responsible for approximately 95 per cent of sales, while the other helped to automate systemic reviews of scientific literature, allowing customers to search through and prioritize studies and research results that were relevant to their work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The company was successful until the 2008 financial crisis, when venture capital investors pulled out and assets were sold off. But O\u2019Blenis didn\u2019t miss a beat. Along with TrialStat\u2019s former president and CEO, Jonathan Barker<\/a>, and fellow Carleton Computer Science alumnus Ian Stefanison<\/a> \u2014 one of TrialStat\u2019s first programmers \u2014 he co-founded a new company, Evidence Partners<\/a>, to focus on the systemic review software.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cWe were experts in that particular domain and didn\u2019t want to just walk away,\u201d says O\u2019Blenis, who figured the software would continue to serve a small niche of customers.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIt seemed like the natural thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

O\u2019Blenis, who became the CEO of the new Kanata-based business, and Stefanison, its chief technology officer, watched their market balloon for more than a decade, thanks to regulators mandating literature reviews as part of the approvals process for new medical devices. And then, when the pandemic sparked a rapid global effort to understand and develop treatments and vaccines for COVID-19, demand soared.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

With a flood of vital research underway and up to 200 COVID-related papers published each day, governments, pharmaceutical companies and other health care entities need help sifting through data to advance their products and guide policy.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s always been the motivation for us \u2014 allowing clients to make evidence-based decisions,\u201d says Stefanison.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cThis has always been important work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Carleton<\/figure>\n\n\n

WHO and Others Line Up<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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Stefanison, who graduated from Carleton in 2006, was drawn to programming because it\u2019s deterministic. \u201cThere\u2019s generally a solution to the problem you\u2019re working on,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He joined TrialStat part time while still at university and dove into a project for a client at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute who needed software to help with systemic reviews, a product that evolved into the world\u2019s first commercially available systematic review platform. Learnings from that process later informed the design and development of DistillerSR<\/a>, the flagship of Evidence Partners\u2019 operations today.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cI learned so much in those early days because of all the hands-on client pressure,\u201d says Stefanison.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cIt was basically like a co-op program.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Evidence
Evidence Partners CTO Ian Stefanison<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

When Evidence Partners rose out of the ashes of TrialStat, Stefanison knew all of the old software\u2019s problems and had an opportunity to fix them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead of relying on hard copies and spreadsheets to monitor thousands of extremely technical medical and pharmaceutical journal articles published each month, customers using DistillerSR were light years more efficient.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn these fields, it\u2019s much better to have a big sample size,\u201d explains Stefanison.<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cThat\u2019s what systemic reviews do. DistillerSR helps people see the big picture.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

When the pandemic hit, Evidence Partners allowed anybody who was doing research related to COVID-19 to use DistillerSR for free. With new information about the virus emerging daily, keeping up to date on the literature was crucial. The World Health Organization, Public Health Agency of Canada and others working in areas such as epidemiology, medical treatment, vaccine development and health economics got on board.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The software remained free to use until the end of last year. Now, new and longstanding customers \u2014 which include some of the world\u2019s largest pharmaceutical and medical device firms \u2014 are fuelling growth that could see the company expand from 34 employees in January 2019 to about 100 by the end of this year.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"Carleton<\/figure>\n\n\n

Carleton Co-op is Springboard<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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O\u2019Blenis chose to enrol in Carleton\u2019s Computer Science program because of what he calls its leadership in object-oriented programming, which is defined as a programming model \u201cthat organizes software design around data, or objects, rather than functions and logic.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Its benefits include code reusability, scalability and efficiency \u2014 attributes that DistillerSR embodies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For O\u2019Blenis, another benefit of attending Carleton was participating in the Computer Science co-op program<\/a>. \u201cThe co-op program was, 100 per cent, the springboard that launched my career,\u201d he says, noting that Evidence Partners has taken on Carleton co-op students.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the things that O\u2019Blenis loves about entrepreneurship is the possibility of \u201chitting a home run anytime.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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\u201cFor the past year, some of the world\u2019s most prominent public health teams and epidemiologists have been using our software to generate evidence that informs critical policy and therapeutic guidelines around COVID-19,\u201d says O\u2019Blenis.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

\u201cMany have told us that they simply would not have been able to do what they\u2019re currently doing without DistillerSR.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cOur team finds it extremely gratifying to be able to play a small part in accelerating this critical research that impacts all of us.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

—
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When Peter O\u2019Blenis was finishing his undergraduate Computer Science degree at Carleton University, he knew that he wanted to start a company someday. \u201cIt\u2019s about building something from scratch,\u201d he says, \u201cand not having any limits \u2014 not having a ceiling over your head.\u201d That entrepreneurial instinct led O\u2019Blenis to launch a video game business […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":410,"featured_media":65776,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"cu_story_type":[17,54],"cu_story_tag":[],"class_list":["post-75199","cu_story","type-cu_story","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","cu_story_type-alumni","cu_story_type-health-wellness"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":"blueprint"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/75199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/cu_story"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/410"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/75199\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98347,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story\/75199\/revisions\/98347"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=75199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"cu_story_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_type?post=75199"},{"taxonomy":"cu_story_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/cu_story_tag?post=75199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}