It’s been more than one year since Merck (NYSE: MRK) launched a digital health arm to develop big data insights in healthcare to guide therapies and develop patient-centered outcomes. CMIO and innovation officer Sachin Jain offered up a progress report detailing some of the collaborations it has forged. It’s working with electronic medical record providers, hospitals and integrated health systems.
First a little background. The catalyst for Merck Medical Information and Innovation or M2i2 was the HITECH Act. Jain said the drug developer realized there would be a lot of new opportunities created by the troves of new data that EHRs would provide.
“We have a very fragmented healthcare delivery system. In order to create a total picture, we need to collaborate to connect the dots,” said Jain. “Our measure of success will be ‘do we improve patient care?'” It will also share findings across Merck.
Jain said the three areas it’s primarily concerned with are: innovative uses of data to generate ideas about disease and treatments; clinical-facing technologies to improve the quality of care and patient safety; and patient-centered outcomes. Here are five of the projects that are underway. Here’s a link to all of the projects outlined in a Slideshare presentation.
- A collaboration with Northwestern University, Alliance of Chicago, and Walgreens is a health IT interventional study to assess the impact of providing simplified and clear medication instructions for patients with multiple chronic conditions;
- It’s working with Allscripts to co-develop clinical decision support content using industry guidelines that would be accessible through the EMR at the point-of-care;
- A collaboration with Maccabi Healthcare Services in Israel will focus on developing insights from treating diabetes and osteoporosis;
- It’s working with Boston Children’s Hospital and a computational epidemiology lab to analyze data from Twitter to develop digital definitions for insomnia. The research project hopes to generate insights on predictors of sleep deprivation based on social media-related behaviors.
- It will work with Humedica, part of UnitedHealth subsidiary Optum, to mine its treasure trove of data to better understand unmet medical needs.
