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.
A new health IT partnership aims to improve clinical data quality and thereby increase the volume of data available for care quality measurement.
The partnership will combine Chicago-based Apervita and Farmington, Connecticut-based Diameter Health’s expertise to provide payers, providers and other healthcare stakeholders with access to clean clinical data for value-based care delivery, said Rick Howard, Apervita’s chief product officer, in an email.
“The healthcare industry has no shortage of data, but the way it’s leveraged continues to be a challenge for both quality measurement and for supporting value-based contracts,” he said.
Apervita provides stakeholders with the infrastructure necessary to develop value-based care models.
Per the new partnership, the company’s quality measurement and value optimization solutions will leverage Diameter Health’s Fusion engine to clean healthcare data in multiple formats, including clinical, claims, behavioral health and laboratory data, Howard explained.
The clean data can be used to glean performance insights that are needed to develop value-based contracts between providers and payers.
Diameter Health’s technology ingests raw — that is, poorly formed, unstructured or incorrectly coded — health information from EHRs, labs and aggregators, and automatically normalizes, re-organizes, deduplicates and summarizes the data, said a Diameter Health spokesperson in an email. The technology identifies data quality errors early in the ingestion process, which makes data sharing more efficient.
“We are thrilled to be a critical and foundational component to Apervita’s platform by delivering clean, normalized, and enriched multi-source clinical data to their customers, empowering providers, payers and other healthcare stakeholders to improve quality and deliver value,” said Eric Rosow, CEO of Diameter Health, in a news release.
Healthcare data is proliferating as the industry becomes more digitized. Telehealth and remote patient monitoring services, in particular, grew exponentially amid the Covid-19 pandemic. And the data generated by these services also grew.
In addition, wearable health technology, like glucose monitors and the Apple Watch, are becoming more widely used to track patient diagnostics and encourage patient engagement, Howard said. This provides even more data for the healthcare industry to contend with.
“As the volume of healthcare data continues to grow, so will the need to have technology that normalizes the data so that it can be used to support quality measurement, value-based contracts and analytics,” he said.
Photo: Dmitrii_Guzhanin, Getty Images
