Dive Brief:
- Deloitte and cloud-based startup Vineti plan to integrate and scale their respective supply chain and patient engagement platforms to enable easier access to next-generation cellular therapies.
- Deloitte's ConvergeHEALTH Patient Connect platform seeks to increase engagement among providers, drug and medical device companies as well as other vendors.
- Vineti, a joint venture of GE and Mayo Clinic, sells a configurable, secure cloud-based platform to connect patients with potential precision medicine options.
Dive Insight:
The collaboration, announced Tuesday, hits a number of hot buttons — the cloud, Big Data, patient engagement and personalized diagnostics and treatments.
According to BCC Research, the global cloud computing market is expected to reach $35 billion by 2022, fueled by demand for anytime/anywhere access to patient data, images and other healthcare information. Healthcare stakeholders are leveraging the cloud for population health, biomedical research, revenue cycle management and a host of other purposes.
Meanwhile, tech companies are moving ahead with products to help doctors and scientists understand the human genome and how to manipulate it to treat serious health conditions. Late last year, Google launched Deep Variant, an open source tool that leverages artificial intelligence to portray a person's genetic blueprint using sequencing data.
The focus on precision medicine has gone beyond tech companies. Providers are getting in the game as well. Earlier this year, Geisinger announced it will offer patients free genomic sequencing as part of their routine care. At about the same time, the National Institutes of Health opened up enrollment for its precision medicine program All of Us, which aims to collect genetic information from 1 million participants.
By combining Deloitte's analytics technology with Vineti's cellular therapies software, the companies say they can increase real-time support for patients, providers, researchers and developers in accessing novel treatment approaches, with the aim of improving safety and outcomes.
"The shift to value based, personalized health care requires new platforms to support not just the patient, but the myriad stakeholders it takes to deliver these targeted breakthroughs to patients," Brett Davis, general manager and principal of Deloitte's ConvergeHEALTH, said in a statement. "[W]e are excited to work with Vineti to address some of the most complex supply chain, workflow and patient engagement challenges to support personalized therapies for our clients."
The partnership also seeks to overcome a major challenge for digital health technologies: scaling up in the provider market. Doctors want evidence that digital tools are accurate and effective.
"Doctors' main pain points are lack of time, huge work loads, dealing with bad technology and a reimbursement model that doesn't reward the right things — specifically, quality of care and outcomes versus quantity of care," Kirti Patel, an obstetrician/gynecologist and digital health startup advisor, previously told Healthcare Dive. "Highly prized qualities would be solutions that save time, decrease the physician workload, improve interaction with technologies and harness technology to aid the clinician in diagnosis or treatment that ultimately leads to better outcomes for patients."
