Deloitte joins forces with Intermountain Healthcare to provide population and health-outcomes research tools

Earlier this year, Deloitte Consulting (New York) announced a collaboration with Intermountain Healthcare (Salt Lake City, UT) to deploy the latter’s trove of healthcare data to assess health outcomes of therapies; the service is called OutcomesMiner. Now, that service is being paired with a related one, PopulationMiner, to analyze patient groups, genetic phenotypes, comorbidities and related personalized-medicine factors.

The goals and capabilities of the collaboration are broad, and will depend on what life sciences companies bring to the table, says Asif Dhar, managing director of Deloitte Health Informatics, and Katherina Holzhauser, assistant VP, information systems commercialization, at Intermountain. Intermountain (which has pioneered digitized healthcare information going back to the 1970s) has a repository of over 2.5 million de-identified patient records; through its Homer Warner Center for Medical Informatics, it also has techniques and expertise in mining this database. Deloitte has its own complementary expertise in data mining and outcomes research.

Together, the two groups will help life sciences companies, healthcare providers and others to test hypotheses in biomarkers, drug development, safety, health economics and outcomes research. The concept is to quickly and economically do preliminary research based on sorting the patient records, and then to possibly carry out full-blown drug development trials, says Dhar. There will be a fee for making use of the service, and intellectual property rights would be worked out beforehand.