A joint initiative announced this week by GE Healthcare and Thomson Reuters is designed to give healthcare organizations and researchers the ability to review and analyze de-identified data from electronic health records with claims data to help determine the impact of various medical treatments among patient populations.
Healthcare analytics teams at GE and Thomson Reuters now have the ability to combine commonly used outcomes or comparative effectiveness research data from the Thomson Reuters' MarketScan research databases with GE's de-identified EHR data.
The EHR data can be linked to claims data for diagnoses, such as hypertension, with an eye on clinical information such as body mass index, symptoms, and blood pressure. Physicians would then have more information on which to base treatment option decisions, reports eWeek.
Researchers from GE and Thomson Reuters first demonstrated the approach of linking de-identified data a year ago at the annual meeting of the International Society for Pharmacoeconomics and Outcomes Research (ISPOR) held in Atlanta. In their presentation, they used hypertension as a sample set--combining de-identified clinical data collected from more than 9,000 electronic medical records with MarketScan claims and prescription data from more than 30 million individuals.
Each dataset has since grown. The companies now can conduct studies that assess the effectiveness of medical treatments, prescription adherence, and disease management initiatives "based on both a deep set of clinical data and extensive data on the complete healthcare experience of a de-identified patient," said Bill Marder, senior vice president at Thomson Reuters, in a statement. This includes all hospitalizations and ambulatory visits.
For more information:
- see the Thomson Reuters announcement
- view the eWeek article
Related Articles:
Consumers worried about healthcare access, costs