Deloitte has moved quickly to tap into the wealth of electronic health records (EHRs) that form the bedrock of the 5-year alliance it formed with Intermountain Health in February. Having unveiled the first fruit of the collaboration in June, Deloitte introduced its second product this week.
The latest tool--called PopulationMiner--is designed to help biopharma companies identify areas of unmet clinical need and financial opportunities. Deloitte has again tapped into the 40-year health history accrued by partner Intermountain Health to power the service, which it is offering on a cloud-based subscription basis. Biopharma companies that sign up to the service can leverage the EHR data to find potential uses for a new compound, or uncover opportunities in new therapeutic areas for existing products.
Despite the seeming potential for the tool to facilitate off-label research, Deloitte's managing director of health informatics Asif Dhar said this wasn't the idea driving development. "The intent is to start a process of meaningful science between life science companies and providers so that the layers of middlemen activity that distance the providers from those companies are eliminated," Dhar told InformationWeek Healthcare. Dhar named data consolidators, salespeople and clinical trial organizations as middlemen that could see their role lessened by use of PopulationMiner.
Healthcare providers and biopharma companies are both potential users of the service, and Deloitte sees the use of a common platform as an enabler of collaboration. OutcomesMiner--the first product to come out of the Deloitte-Intermountain collaboration--was also aimed at both sides. Deloitte built the earlier product to support the comparative effectiveness and pharmacoeconomic outcomes research projects biopharma is running to meet payer demands for evidence of a drug's value.
- read the InformationWeek article
- check out the Deloitte release
- and its data sheet