grants and proposals with a number of healthcare organizations that have come to us because of our experience with registries and due to the fact that we’ve done some comparative effectiveness studies. We’ve partnered with them to apply for federal grants. I think good things are going to happen.
X: Why would Outcome’s technology be useful for conducting comparative effectiveness studies?
RG: Comparative effectiveness, if you go to the definition, is really about how one potential approach a provider might use versus another. Registries in particular have been highlighted as one of the infrastructure needs for the U.S. to have a broad approach to comparative effectiveness research, and we’ve been in the middle of that because of the work we’ve done with AHRQ and others.
X: What role, if any, do you think social media used by patients and doctors should play in capturing clinical outcomes data?
RG: This question comes up a lot. I think that social media could be used on the patient side through groups such as PatientsLikeMe.com and others like that. There are pluses that you get people together in an organized way, but the minuses are that there are biases about who participates and who doesn’t participate. That’s even more so on the physician side. I think that there’s a lot of opportunity there, but the right formula for how to utilize social media most effectively isn’t quite there. But we’re looking at those media and we’re using those tools to try to figure out what are the benefits. And there are some early product development initiatives. For example, we have created tools that enable a community of patients with heart disease to be followed in a registry. Let me explain how this works. If you are a patient that is active and interested in your health, you enroll in a registry to contribute information to that registry, which is used in research, to help other patients like you. We’ve found that to be a very effective method to track patients long-term, and we’re doing it in a number of different areas. Patients like it because they are able to get feedback such as educational information.
X: What is your long-term vision for how Outcome could serve as a conduit for improving healthcare decisions?
RG: This is actually the crux of everything. Decision makers need real-world information. The patient is a decision-maker, asking whether he or she should take the recommendation of his or her doctor or not. The physician is a decision-maker, asking should I offer therapy “X” or “Y” and what should my preferences be and why. The health insurers are making decisions about whether they should cover something or not. Regulators are decision makers that must ask questions like should I leave a certain drug such as Vioxx on the market.
What we’re finding is that decision makers need more real-time information, kind of like the Bloomberg News approach. Physicians want to know not just how patients do in a clinical trial but how do my patients do relative to other physicians and what happens if I give them treatment “A” or “B.” Insurers want to know is there enough evidence—not just in a clinical trial, but within the population that we actually are covering—about whether this product will work, or will it lower costs, or will it improve care in some way. We see that more and more information will have visibility and be available in real time. We’re providing access to that information closer and closer to real time. That’s sort of where we see things going.
X: What in the way of digital technologies do you envision using to deliver information in real time?
RG: We currently deliver information to certain groups via the Web and interactive voice, basically having sort of a cloud database that is processing—within the scientific limits of that framework—information that you can use to provide feedback to whomever is accessing it based on who they are. That’s actually a core part of our patent, and that’s a model that we see being adopted the fastest.
