FlatIron Health – using data analytics to find a treatment for cancer
What is FlatIron Health? [1]
Flatiron is a company tackling one of the biggest health challenges of our century –cancer. Flatiron is an oncology platform that aggregates patient data from electronic health records (EHR), lab and medical claims and matches it with patient trial data.
FlatIron OncologyCloud platform has three major components. The first, OncoEMR is cloud-based system for cancer providers to manage patient EHRs. Features include e-prescribing, clinical content library and secured direct messaging. OncoBilling is an integrated system that enables insurance companies to better managing filing and managing of claims. The most data driven asset for the company is OncoAnalytics, a tool that delivers clinical insights based on aggregation of data across multiple systems. Used cases include improving billing inconsistencies, better understand drug utilization and variability, identify target candidates for clinical trials and an ability to integrate and clean disparate data sources.
How does FlatIron Health create value? [2] [3]
Narrow criteria for eligibility, financial costs and lack of biomarkers often impede progress in cancer clinical research. In a world where only 4% of cancer patients actually enroll in clinical trials, the ability for Flatiron to digitize healthcare data aids physicians to make more informed decisions around patient eligibility for patient trials. Flatiron is able to aggregate all relevant patient data in real-time to help inform eligibility for patients for future cancer trials.
The biggest data leap for healthcare provider is that they want actionable data.
Flatiron iron works with healthcare providers to better identify not only billing efficiencies but a better understand of the cancer patient.
Flatiron is collaborating with the FDA to investigate use of real world evidence outside of the clinical trial data to be utilized to test the safety and efficacy of cancer therapies.
For clinical research and biopharma, Flatiron, in conjunction with Foundation Medicine have launched the creation of a clinic-genomic database for oncology that inegrates genomic sequenced data with Flatiron EHR database so that clinical research can have real-world information to use to test efficacy of current oncology therapies and clinical trial drugs.
How does the company capture value? [4]
Flatiron sells its software products directly to healthcare stakeholders including biopharma and providers. Biopharma companies can utilize Flatiron’s products to improve clinical trial enrollment and tracking real world outcomes. In a similar vein, providers can use the suite of offerings to improve clinical care around billing, quality measures and treatment pathway for oncology.
Differentiating factors
While Flatiron operates in a closed loop system they compete with any other large data centers that are aggregating data such as government groups like UK’s NHS to other genomics companies like Foundation Medicine and Human Longevity that aggregate their own data. Since Flatiron works on a B2B basis, the company does not have the scale advantages of aggregating patient data on a consumer level.
Challenges
Flatiron Health operates on a closed loop system – but issues around privacy and security is always an issue. Integration with the disparate clinical work flows will also be a challenge. So will working with the often discombobulated, unstructured data that needs to be cleansed in this process.
Moving ahead the greatest challenge for Flatiron would be developing predictive analytics on top of its platform so that the data it aggregates can lead to actionable and meaningful insights for its provider and biopharma customers and ultimately for the cancer patients.