Companies like Explorys Medical Inc. could benefit from–and help harness–key health care reform efforts to reduce cost and raise the quality of patient care.
Launched last year by two data management veterans in collaboration with the Cleveland Clinic, Explorys has hired 11 employees–filling its University Circle storefront office– and snagged a $17.6 million, 10-year job creation tax credit from Ohio for potentially creating more than 300 jobs.
The tax credit was “an economic shot in the arm,” said Charlie Loughheed, president, chief technology officer and co-founder of Explorys. “We have our core team together,” including engineering, clinical data analysis, development and sales and marketing leaders.
“We’re doing a lot of recruiting out of the Tech Belt in Pittsburgh, Akron and Cleveland,” Lougheed said. “There’s a lot of code being written here. There’s an enormous amount of work to be done.”
Explorys is building a network to assemble, manage and leverage burgeoning medical data to speed discovery and bridge clinical information gaps. Steve McHale, the company’s chief executive and co-founder, and Lougheed plan to use the network to help researchers and clinicians pose data-driven hypotheses and then collaborate to answer them, Lougheed said.
Explorys would collect anonymized data from network members and make it available to users so they can “develop a hypothesis in a quick, inexpensive and painless way,” Lougheed said. In this way, Explorys is “less revolutionary and more hyperspeed evolutionary” in the research process, he said.
Given the national health care debate and the urgency to solve escalating costs, McHale and Lougheed also see an increasing opportunity to use information collected through electronic health records to improve the quality of medicine and reduce its cost.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“So the more we understand how effective certain treatments are … and the more we can tie that to cost, over time, I think that will be valuable. Very valuable,” Lougheed said.
The health care debate also has heightened “the awareness that we need to think about performance in this space and that data is available to do it,” he said. “It just has to be collected and organized in a way that makes it easy for health care providers to bring that together.”
The company also could use its network to provide “comparative effectiveness” intelligence to health care providers and pharmaceutical and life sciences companies, Lougheed said. Comparative effectiveness is comparing two or more medical treatments for benefits, risks and costs
The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act of 2009 set aside $1.1 billion for comparative effectiveness research. It also is making available $19 billion for health information technology initiatives, including the rollout of electronic health record technologies at small doctors’ offices and hospitals.
This could help hospitals and businesses develop better, more cost-efficient products and services. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that $700 billion a year (pdf) is spent on health care that fails to lead to better patient outcomes.
But first, Explorys has to finish building its system.
“One of the big milestones is getting the system built and made available,” said Lougheed, who expects that to happen this summer. Explorys hopes to land its first clients by the end of the year. “We’re actively negotiating with one major life science provider and beginning negotiations with another one,” he said.
the awareness that we need to think about performance in this space, and that
data is available to do it. It just has been collected and organized in a way
that makes it easy for healthcare providers to bring that together.
I think that’s where we fill a big gap. So I do think the efforts in washington
will be 12:51 accretive to our value proposition, what we’re doing here in
cleveland.
