UPMC Enterprises, the commercialization and investment arm of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, will put more than $3 million into the first six innovations created under the auspices of the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance.
The Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance is a year-old collaboration between UPMC, the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University. The alliance seeks to innovate in digital health as it applies to Big Data, analytics and interoperability.
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The UPMC Enterprises funding will help researchers at Pitt and Carnegie Mellon build out technologies intended to improve patient safety, advance cancer diagnosis and provide personalized medicine, the organizations said. UPMC Enterprises President Tal Heppenstall called these six projects the “first of many exceptional ideas in the Health Data Alliance pipeline.”
The funding is for the next six months, UPMC Enterprises said. In that time, the group will further evaluate the commercial potential of project as it considers whether to commit more money.
Five of the six projects originated from Pitt’s Center for Commercial Applications of Healthcare Data; the first on this list is from the Pittsburgh Health Data Alliance’s Center for Machine Learning and Health, led by Carnegie Mellon:
- The Clinical Genomics Modeling Platform, an engine for creating precision medicine models.
- MEDIvate, a smartphone app for patients to manage and share their medication list and to provide medication reminders. It will connect to the institutions’ electronic health records.
- The Tumor-specific Driver Identification (TDI) System, software that applies tumor-specific algorithms to genetic data to help in the personalization of cancer therapies.
- Fall Sentinel, continuous-monitoring technology for pharmacists to look for drug interactions that could trigger falls by patients in nursing homes and other high-risk environments.
- PUMP, a system that collects data from hospital bed sensors and wearable devices to document patient repositioning and prevent pressure ulcers.
- Computational Pathology for Accurate Cancer Diagnosis (ComPACD), software to help pathologists make sense of complex images of tumors.
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“These projects represent some of the key areas of focus for UPMC Enterprises, namely clinical tools that will transform the delivery of care; population management that will be essential in healthcare’s move from volume to value; consumer-centric healthcare; and business services that improve efficiency,” Heppenstall said.
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