Why a New Approach to RWE Is Central to the Future of Healthcare

Never before has evidence-based medicine meant so much to so many. Even before the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world in mid-March, addressing the growing burden of disease in the U.S. was a losing battle. Despite progress in medical innovation and unprecedented spending on healthcare, Americans have continued to bear the burden of chronic disease and increasingly poor outcomes. In fact, according to a recent analysis by the Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker, the United States continues to lag behind comparably wealthy countries in terms of health outcomes, quality of care, and access to services.

How can this still be the case? One explanation: providers, health plans, population health authorities, and life sciences companies have struggled to effectively target at-risk populations and improve outcomes. In large part, this is because they simply have not had the breadth of data that would allow them to see the entire population. Nor have they had the depth of data to understand individual patient journeys. Finally, they lack timely data that would allow them to intervene with a patient at the ideal moment. The inability to access both population stability and longitudinal data is one of the biggest hurdles plaguing those who seek to leverage real-world data to improve outcomes.

Now, six months into a pandemic that has not only moved the goalposts on care delivery but also driven researchers and providers to make high-stakes discoveries while practicing in real-time, the need for access to comprehensive and timely patient data has become even more vital. Still, in many corners of healthcare, the data needed to do this remains siloed and the insights episodic.

The Value of Complete Real-World Evidence

As the urgent need for real-world evidence (RWE) grows, Komodo has taken a unique approach to deliver these insights. From our founding, Komodo has completely disrupted the way stakeholders manage and extract value from large datasets.

Instead of reselling aggregated lagged data that only captures fragments of the patient experience in large spreadsheets, we deliver workflow-focused software that enables our customers to draw insights from complete patient journeys through the healthcare system. That means capturing real-time, real-world touchpoints to identify specific cohorts of de-identified patients at key stages of progression, including those experiencing specific patterns of treatment as well as those subject to gaps in care. Unlike data vendors who collect and aggregate insurance claims data, we’ve built an entire suite of offerings on top of the world’s most comprehensive view of patient encounters to provide a complete understanding of the entire patient journey in near real-time.

That map of patient encounters grows daily, providing a clear picture of variations in treatment and outcomes over a short or long period of time. Every day, through more than 150 comprehensive payer datasets, Komodo adds more than 15 million newly identified patient encounters to its growing database of more than 65 billion clinical encounters.

Whether identifying trends in care related to the COVID-19 pandemic, finding patients with rare conditions, or enhancing new product launch plans, the insights gleaned through our suite of solutions can help users to tackle some of the biggest challenges in healthcare. Here are four software applications that are already helping our partners take a more holistic, patient-centric view of real-world patient journeys:

• Aperture empowers life sciences teams and patient advocacy groups with deep, patient-centric insights to identify and respond to disease burden patterns.
• Pulse provides alerts that enable optimal provider engagement based on new patient signals.
• Prism is a population health analytics platform that offers the flexibility to tap into our Healthcare Map to study and analyze the natural history of disease across patient cohorts.
• Sentinel enables customers with a secure, hosted environment to enrich their insights by co-mingling their data with ours.

For rich RWE analysis, the best data is required throughout the entire continuum of care. Our software and solutions are built on the data necessary to provide real-world insight. In fact, these efforts have earned us recognition from Frost & Sullivan as the company of the year for innovating in RWE.

Commenting on this award, Frost & Sullivan Principal Analyst Koustav Chatterjee says of Komodo: "With COVID-19 placing significant pressures on the U.S. healthcare system, Komodo's software solutions have proven invaluable in creating a comprehensive understanding of individual patients' journeys. Its best-in-class solutions, along with comprehensive support and service for partners, have made it the ideal RWE solution provider to the healthcare industry."

As we continue our mission to reduce the burden of disease, we will continue to center our insights on the patient journey. Only by basing our clinical decisions on real-world, evidence-based insights can we truly deliver better value and better outcomes, and we believe that capability is well within our grasp.