Boston-based Brigham and Women’s Hospital and its Center for Patient Safety Research and Practice, led by David Bates, are announcing today a collaboration with GNS Healthcare to use supercomputing technology to improve patient care. Cambridge, MA-based GNS Healthcare’s computer-simulation models will be used to predict the likelihood of adverse drug events and hospital readmission in patients with congestive heart failure.
“That’s really just a starting point,” says Tom Neyarapally, senior vice president of corporate development for GNS Healthcare, of the congestive heart failure application. “In the long run the idea is that we will be to do the same type of work across many diseases.”
It’s the first partnership GNS Healthcare has announced regarding work it’s done with healthcare payers, providers, or prescription benefit managers, says Neyarapally. In 2010 Cambridge-based Gene Network Sciences formed the GNS Healthcare subsidiary to focus on applying its computer models in the healthcare space—by helping doctors determine which drugs or combination of drugs will be most successful in patients, and conversely, which will lead to negative reactions. Gene Network Sciences now operates as a subsidiary of Via Science under the name GNS Healthcare.
In the Brigham partnership, GNS Healthcare will take data from the electronic health records of thousands of congestive heart failure patients admitted into the Partners HealthCare system. The aim is to track the relationships between such variables as diagnoses and combinations of drugs patients are taking, and then determine how they might cause an adverse reaction. The technology can also take into consideration the order in which certain diagnoses occurred or drugs were taken—factors that add a new level of complexity to predicting patient outcomes, Neyarapally says. Brigham can then use
