Komodo Health, a healthcare data analytics company, announced two new specialty data partners last week that aim to expand the insights of its platform.
MapEnhance, first unveiled in 2023, features a library of specialty data sets from Komodo and its partners. They can be linked with Komodo’s Healthcare Map, an anonymized data set on more than 330 million Americans, to drive nuanced research inquiries.
The latest partners to be announced are GeneDx, with its rare disease genomics data, and COTA Healthcare, which brings in clinical oncology data. Komodo has also been expanding its own data products (PDF), including clinical observations, lab results, insurance coverage, mortality and patient race and ethnicity.
The platform expansion comes at a time when there is a growing interest in real-world data, Komodo and COTA executives said in interviews.
Organizations specializing in data are coming to Komodo because they see the value in a potential partnership, said co-founder and president Web Sun. They request to go to market together to offer the combined power of their data sets to end users and to ultimately benefit patients via MapEnhance.
“We keep getting approached,” Sun said. “For us, that’s a really strong validation of the approach that we’ve taken.”
“Clients are looking to understand a fuller view of patients,” Sandy Leonard, COTA’s chief commercial officer, told Fierce Healthcare.
Historically, research questions have been limited because the scope of their data has been limited, Sun said. Now, with the combined capabilities offered via MapEnhance, they are getting at the outcomes—able to compare the effectiveness of various treatments, or how drug adherence or other social determinants of health (SDOH) can impact outcomes.
“The questions have always been so rudimentary,” Sun said. “Now we’re saying, does it actually change an outcome for a patient, does it actually improve survival?”
This year, there were 33 new Komodo-powered health economics and outcomes research (HEOR) studies presented at the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research Global Conference. One such peer-reviewed study leveraged Komodo’s race and ethnicity data asset to analyze medication adherence among schizophrenia patients. Another study leveraged Komodo and a genomics partner data set to validate the accuracy of an algorithm used to identify certain breast cancer patients in claims data.
COTA, which partners with oncology clinics to get EHR data, has often participated in regulatory use cases and is looking to grow its position in HEOR, per Leonard. Komodo is a helpful partner to start with because of its experience in this realm. In addition to serving end users through MapEnhance, COTA is thinking about ways to build on its data using Komodo. As one example, COTA might be able to use Komodo or partners' data to help fill gaps in SDOH or race data in its own data.
“One of the benefits of being able to do that type of overlap is you kind of build out that patient 360-degree view—you’re getting all the aspects of the patient,” Leonard said. But, she cautioned, the more overlapping data points there are, the more the risk of re-identification of a patient goes up. Komodo helps think about those privacy concerns, she added, calling it “one of those additional value-adds for the end client.”
Indeed, part of the advertised Komodo appeal is its rigorous process for de-duplicating, normalizing, analyzing and collecting data as they enter its Healthcare Map. “We make it easy, we make it high quality, we make it high trust,” Sun said.
When it comes to considering data partners, Komodo looks at possible use cases and the potential for maximum impact, Sun said. If an organization's data are too niche and limited in scope, they can’t truly move the needle. Komodo also assesses whether an organization is collecting its data in the right way and what the overall value-add would be to the ecosystem of Komodo partners and clients.
Historically, with oncology drugs, life sciences players have focused more on clinical outcomes—not necessarily the value of those outcomes, Leonard said. With the Inflation Reduction Act, Leonard expects there to be a push to understand their cost implications as much as their clinical outcomes. MapEnhance is well positioned to support those use cases, Leonard said.