Dr. Amy Abernethy, a medical oncologist from Duke University School of Medicine who has championed clinical informatics and working with patients to develop more personalized cancer care, has joined Flatiron Health, according to a company statement.
As chief medical officer and senior vice president of oncology, Abernethy will work with cancer care providers, life science companies and data partners to develop solutions to data and analytic problems. She will also head up clinical and oncology data teams. Abernethy is taking a leave of absence from most of her roles at Duke, including co-director of Duke’s Cancer Care Research Center and Center for Learning Health Care, to help move the company forward.
In the statement Abernethy explained why she took the position:
“We are at a critical crossroads in cancer care…Cancer data science has the potential to improve the lives of countless patients and families. But we still need to develop the strategic and operational pathways. Flatiron Health has the vision and ingenuity needed to revolutionize cancer care and I’m excited to be a member of the team working to solve this puzzle.”
Flatiron Health’s OncologyCloud helps cancer centers and physicians aggregate clinical, practice management and billing data. Its first application for providers is a web-based program that’s designed to integrate a cancer center’s disparate data systems and give real-time business and clinical intelligence with benchmarking. It’s also developing a tool for life science companies to use OncologyCloud to accelerate research by matching patients to available clinical trials and automating data collection. The idea is that better treatment matches personalized to each patients’ cancer type can produce better outcomes.
Earlier this year it raised $130 million in a Series B round led by Google Ventures. That funding helped Flatiron acquire oncology EMR business Altos Solutions earlier this year. Since that deal, Flatiron has worked to integrate OncologyCloud with the specialized EMR platform, OncoEMR.
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.
[Photo credit: Inside Duke University Medicine]
