Clinical trials matching: how the Epic EHR is becoming a platform
Epic is ramping up its platform play.
Having just announced the launch of the Life Sciences Program, its new clinical trials matching solution, the electronic health record (EHR) company is making aggressive moves to capitalize on three of their core assets to become a platform business:
healthcare data
sticky health system relationships
the ecosystem of digitized transactions and interactions that drive patient care.
Epic describes the following key features (quoted from the announcement)
“Matching participating providers with clinical trial opportunities suited to the makeup of their patient populations.
Sending participating providers purpose-built Cosmos searches to help them validate whether a trial is right for them without the need to develop their own queries.
Making clinical trials accessible to more provider groups by lowering the technical and staffing barriers to study activation.
Increasing clinical trial efficiency by eliminating duplicative workflows and connecting researchers, care teams, patients, and sponsors through a single system.
Supporting clinicians with point-of-care insights into when their patients might qualify for a clinical trial and applying predictive models to assist with the timing of therapy administration.”
I wrote in a post last year about how EHR systems are beginning to look like platform businesses because of three core characteristics:
A high percentage of mission critical processes in healthcare delivery involve the EHR, making it an incredibly sticky product.
EHRs accumulate rich data with each additional interaction occurring on its system.
“EHR integration” is a favorite word among healthcare technology vendors. What this means is if the EHR, rather than being a barrier, becomes a facilitator for this integration (and not just with the healthcare provider, but also between vendors), it could unlock a lot of value.
Epic’s Life Sciences Program is an example of how an EHR system can stitch together these components into a powerful product if executed well. For example, Epic can aggregate data from documented clinical encounters (sourced from mission critical care delivery processes) and create large cohorts across health systems (data aggregation). Pharmaceutical companies running clinical trials can partner with Epic to access these cohorts and cross reference with their trial eligibility criteria to look for potential trial participants. A provider using Epic can also proactively look up potential clinical trials for their patient at the point of care while using Epic during the clinical encounter (a mission critical process). The addition of the patient (and associated clinical documentation) also adds to Epic’s database to facilitate future clinical trial matching opportunities (data accumulation). All of this facilitates interactions between the patient, provider, and pharmaceutical company recruiting for a clinical trial that otherwise may not have occurred.
Many in the industry emphasize Epic’s advantage in aggregating healthcare data (some have predicted that Epic may eventually become just a healthcare database company), but often underestimate the importance of sticky health system relationships and mission critical healthcare transactions and interactions that Epic owns. A successful platform needs to not only facilitate data exchange, but enable value added transactions between different entities that would otherwise not occur.
Epic’s announcement includes the following quote from Alan Hutchinson, Vice President at Epic: “The Life Sciences program is designed to create a seamless connection between participant patients, healthcare providers, and research sponsors through the use of a single system. Unifying clinical research with care delivery and building a direct connection to study sponsors will help accelerate the development of new therapies by making studies more efficient, more accessible, and more effective.”
Sounds pretty platform-y to me.