Spend any time talking with Life Sciences professionals about how they use real-world evidence (RWE), and you will invariably hear the term “data silo.” This phrase has come to define an entire category of frustrating roadblocks and unnecessary hurdles that stand between the promise of a complete view of the patient experience and the reality of disjointed datasets and fragmented approaches to data access. It’s also the reason why the Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) and Clinical Development professionals surveyed in our recent RWE benchmarking study cited “data management” as their greatest barrier to insights.
This challenge persists — despite the widespread availability of claims, electronic health record (EHR), lab, genomics, and other real-world patient datasets — as an artifact of how data has historically been aggregated and sold and the manner in which Life Sciences companies were set up to use it once purchased. It is an outgrowth of the legacy marketplace model of RWE, whereby the primary data sources have been aggregators and marketplaces that build their businesses on selling more data as opposed to delivering more comprehensive insights.
Breaking Down the Silos
Now, thanks to advances in cloud capabilities, artificial intelligence (AI), and powerful analytics, we are upending the legacy data marketplace model by focusing on drawing insights from longitudinal patient journeys and breaking down those silos once and for all.
One area where this new approach to RWE is already showing incredible results is in our collaboration with COTA Healthcare to link COTA’s high-quality oncology data with our Healthcare Map™. By pairing this highly curated oncology patient data with more than 330 million patient journeys, we are making it possible to transform disconnected Life Sciences workflows into streamlined value chains of patient insights.
A Complete, Connected View
For example, Clinical Development teams historically have focused on EHR and genomics data when it comes to site selection, patient recruitment, and safety information. Meanwhile, Commercial and HEOR teams have used claims data primarily to inform provider outreach initiatives and test comparative effectiveness. Rarely have all of these teams had access to the complete patient journey, including both claims and EHR datasets. When they do, however, it changes everything.
Working from a joint dataset that includes EHR, claims, and genomics data, Clinical Development teams can develop a truly end-to-end story for each patient. This enables them to use RWE to build a separate external control arm to better understand a particular therapy’s impact outside the confines of the trial. Likewise, for HEOR and Commercial teams, the ability to tap into curated EHR and genomics datasets creates entirely new insights into what’s actually happening in the patient population and how patients are responding to particular therapies.
Transforming RWE Workflows
The result of this holistic enterprise approach to RWE is a much more nuanced set of signals about how patients behave in the real world and, in turn, a much more robust view of clinical effectiveness, market size, and patient and provider engagement. That combination has the power to change everything.
By linking these once-discrete datasets into a complete view of the patient experience, it is possible to see an end-to-end picture of the patient’s entire health journey, informing all aspects of the product life cycle, from phase 1 study to post-marketing commitments.
This is the governing thesis behind our MapEnhance™ offering, which allows Komodo Health customers to automatically integrate a wide range of specialized data products, including lab, clinical, chargemaster, and genomics testing insights from Komodo’s partners to deliver a more comprehensive, complete view of the patient journey. As we’ve seen in our work with COTA, whereby we’ve integrated their curated oncology datasets with our proprietary datasets using MapEnhance, this ability to create flexible linkages across multiple data sources is helping to break down data silos and pave the way for ever more robust insights.
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