Miami Beach was full of energy last week at the ViVE event, even inside the convention center, with healthcare leaders from around the country talking about what’s working, what’s not working, and where we need to go to improve. That energy was most palpable whenever the idea of data collaboration came up. We need access to data. It needs to be efficient. It needs to be secure. It needs to be now.
In the past two years, data collaboration in healthcare, or the lack thereof, has been at the forefront of many discussions – and in a public way like never before. Since March 2020, the front page of pretty much any news source has included a dashboard of COVID-19 statistics and routine questions (yes, usually more questions than answers) that required access to patient data. The message that we need to do better was loud and clear. Although data collaboration talk was everywhere at ViVE, it actually wasn’t so much in the context of COVID-19.
There was talk about data collaboration between providers; between pharma and providers; between payers and providers; and between startups and pharma and payers and providers. There was talk of patient-facing applications and of improving health system performance through data collaboration. There was, of course, talk of standards and buzzwords (the words “interoperability” and “FHIR” definitely got their moments). There was also talk that we haven’t really done it yet as small initiatives and big ones (pick from a long list of Fortune 500 who have tried) have merely scratched the surface of data collaboration.
Enter MDClone’s ability to enable dynamic access to data directly from the source while protecting patient privacy. The message of inviting users to interact with data without mediation surely resonated at the conference, but it’s more than the concept that resonated. The use cases are starting to speak for themselves: academic institutions evaluating chronic disease prediction models on disparate populations; operators understanding care variation between facilities on opposite sides of the world; and pharma evaluating guidelines for new cancer treatments based on structured and unstructured data from multiple health systems
Data collaboration in healthcare may have had its most public moment yet thanks to the pandemic, and now it’s here to stay.
