Health Tech

Atropos Health Launches Evidence Network to Back Its Physician Consult Service

Atropos Health — a company that delivers clinical data to physicians at the point of care to help them treat complex patients — recently launched a clinical advisory board and new evidence network. Both announcements are meant to enhance the credibility and transparency of its physician consult platform, CEO Brigham Hyde said at ViVE in Nashville.

When caring for patients with rare and/or complex conditions, physicians often don’t know exactly what to do. During appointments, they’re often left scrambling to gather clinical research and information on how to best form a treatment plan, meaning they have another stressful, complicated task adding to their already long work day. But what if they could simply explain the situation to an app, and then a generative AI service would present them with evidence-based reports on how to best care for the patient in question? That’s the whole idea behind Atropos Health.

When I talked to to Atropos CEO Brigham Hyde in August following the company’s $14 million Series A funding round, he described the company’s point-of-care report service as a “full boat, publication-grade observational research study on deidentified EMR patients, including the use of high dimensional propensity score matching for statistical error correction.” When we caught up this week at ViVE, a healthcare innovation conference in Nashville, he explained how the company has recently strengthened the credibility of its services through its newly formed clinical advisory board and evidence network.

Founded in 2020 as a Stanford spinout, Atropos was created with the goal that physicians would one day have to extrapolate less. The companies’ point-of-care reports give physicians rapid access to evidence about which treatments work for certain patients so they don’t have to rely on informed guesses as much.

“Our services are designed to feel like physicians are talking to a colleague, kind of like ChatGPT. They type their question to us in a few sentences, and we turn around a really clear and detailed response. And it takes them less than 15 minutes to consume the information, and it’s backed by millions of patients’ evidence, which gives them great confidence in decisions they’ll make,” Hyde explained.

Atropos is “in the middle of publishing” a ROI study that it conducted during the first year its platform was adopted at Stanford Health Care, he declared. While the exact metrics have yet to be released, Hyde said the study proves that Atropos’ service can reduce readmissions, mortality, length of stay, drug costs, adverse events and out-of-network referrals. He said he is excited to release these results because these metrics are “the types of things that people who run hospitals focus on to meet their bottom line needs.”

With the launch of its clinical advisory board, Atropos can now receive guidance from physicians and executives from large health systems, such as John Hopkins Medicine and LifePoint Health, to help its platform provide more value to hospitals. Atropos will work closely with these expert advisors to understand how to effectively implement its product at more hospitals and seamlessly fit into physician workflows, Hyde explained.

Atropos’ other recent announcement, its evidence network, seeks to equip physicians with the most appropriate and relevant data possible to help answer their questions. Oftentimes, that data can come from patient care that previously occurred in the physician’s own health system. But other times, it makes more sense to use data from outside the institution. The evidence network comprises dozens of partners, such as ASCO CancerLinQ and Mayo Clinic, and allows physicians to securely access deidentified data from these organizations.

“Let’s say I have a complicated oncology patient. Well, maybe we’ve only seen a few of these patients in my institution, so I need another option. Our partners like ASCO CancerLinQ have millions and millions of oncology patients. So we can take the question, and without any data having to be transferred or any HIPAA risk, we can send that question to ASCO and turn the answer quickly,” Hyde said.

When a physician receives their answer from the evidence network, it comes stamped with a “real world data score,” which Hyde described as a “credit score for data.” 

Atropos developed this data scoring system to address data bias and the fact that studies reproduced on different data often have different outcomes. The score evaluates the dataset’s quality based on elements such as size, completeness and longitudinality. 

“In doing that, we’re upping transparency by showing where there’s bias or weakness in results, and we’re also offering the opportunity to run your question by multiple datasets,” Hyde explained.

Atropos sells its platform, which now includes the evidence network, mainly to academic health systems. As physicians start to use the newly enhanced platform to inform their care plans, it will be interesting to see whether it leads to better treatment outcomes for patients.

Photo: Asawin_Klabma, Getty Images

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