the hypotheses created to look at a given patient and determine how he or she matches up against certain variables tracked in the system, to better understand the likelihood of a negative drug reaction or hospital readmission.
“Something like this is not a research project; it gets deployed to be able to support decision making,” says Neyarapally. Doctors can then avoid administering the drugs likely to cause harm and find alternate treatments, or pay closer attention to patients in which the adverse events cannot be prevented—rather than treating a patient after the fact and backtracking to determine the cause of reactions.
“Experts can hone in on a small number of trillions of possibilities,” Neyarapally says.
GNS Healthcare, whose scientific advisory board is co-chaired by Xconomist Eric Schadt, is not revealing the financial terms surrounding the Brigham and Women’s partnership, Neyarapally says. When former Xconomy correspondent Ryan McBride profiled GNS Healthcare in April 2010, its CEO Colin Hill saw big revenue potential in the healthcare unit. He suggested it would be easier to track the success of the technology in reducing unsuccessful treatments and lowering healthcare costs for payers than it would be to trace the success of the computer models in drug development—the company’s original focus. Adverse events that could have been prevented are estimated to run the U.S. healthcare system $50 billion per year, GNS said in its announcement today.
Neyarapally says GNS is still toying with revenue models for the healthcare business, but options include sharing in the savings that result from deploying the technology, licensing the technology to groups who want to use them, or working with disease management firms who manage care on a per member, per month basis.
