Monday, November 21, 2011

Aetna, Harvard Med School team on healthcare IT research

By Lori Valigra, Mass High Tech correspondent

The Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and health insurer Aetna of Hartford, Conn., have entered into a research agreement to analyze health care data with the aim of improving the quality and affordability of health care.

The research, to be conducted by both organizations, will be supervised by Isaac Kohane, co-director of the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics, and Brian Kelly, head of Informatics and Strategic Alignment at Aetna.

Kohane said the collaboration will develop and deploy algorithms and applications aimed at making an impact on biomedical discovery and patient care. The bioinformatics field applies computer science and information technology to biology and medicine.

He added that if the current health care system is to become a learning system, “We need to better use the enormous amount of information derived from health care to develop tools to understand what is happening today.” That includes which drugs are not working as safely as has been thought, which therapies have unexpected benefits, what are the predictors of effective diabetes management, and which genetic tests are likely to usefully guide therapy. He added that major advances in research and clinical care can be made by applying new bioinformatics techniques to clinical databases.

The researchers will focus on evaluating the outcomes of various treatments for specific conditions based on quality and cost, determining factors that predict adherence to medical and drug treatments for chronic diseases, studying how claims data and clinical data from electronic health records can be used to predict disease and follow outcomes, and improving the ability to predict adverse events by proactively studying claims and clinical data.