Creating what will be the mothership of all outcomes research, PearlDiver Technologies, a division of Liventa Biosciences, is teaming up with Humana Inc. to provide healthcare professionals with an unprecedented amount of data.With PearlDiver’s proprietary portal, healthcare researchers, investigators and other professionals will be able to conduct lightning fast, customized research in a longitudinal fashion.Comprehensive Health Insights, Inc. (CHI), the healthcare outcome research group of Humana, will work with PearlDiver to integrate Humana’s proprietary data into PearlDiver’s research system.
In the November 25, 2014 news release, PearlDiver President and Chief Technology Officer Benjamin Young noted, “This offering provides a fast and economic way to perform an immense amount of research. Studies that were once performed over months and years now can be done over an entire population in minutes. Such capabilities emphasize our focus on the evolution of the way research is performed.”
“This strategic alliance will provide a unique capability for clients to leverage integrated claims and other public data in one central repository.” said Steve Chick, Market Vice President of Humana. “This functionality provides the ability to answer real world research questions in real-time, and identify potential treatment patterns and other outcomes research that supports Humana’s vision on improving population health.”
“Users will be able to conduct outcomes research within private payer and Medicare populations. They will be able to refine research hypotheses as research progresses, create custom cohorts of patients based upon diagnoses and/or procedures, and track custom patient groups longitudinally.”
Regarding the integration of PearlDiver and Humana data, Benjamin Young told OTW, “Humana has provided us with their raw data. We are converting this data into a format that our proprietary software can use to perform complex, longitudinal (multiple-year) healthcare outcomes, cost and other medical research projects. Under this alliance, Humana’s massive database will be researchable directly through PearlDiver software. Our two firms will be pairing the Humana data with our Buckets Language data mining tool. That will, we believe, create the most complete, up-to-date, medical dataset that can be used by researchers to answer complex, longitudinal questions in record time. The Buckets Language data mining tool is, by far, the fastest data mining toolset on the market.”
PearlDiver Senior Analyst Scott Ellison stated, “We are very excited about this alliance. Once we have completed integration of Humana’s data into the PearlDiver database, and testing and de-bugging is completed, we hope to be setting up access to the data for our customers during the month of January.”
Young noted, “The Humana dataset will be our largest dataset to date with over three billion de-identified patient charging records. These records will include all of their physician, outpatient, inpatient, prescription drug, and lab records. This will be the first time we will be able to longitudinally track a patient through their physician visits to their outpatient procedures to their inpatient stays along with their prescriptions drugs and their lab records. The initial dataset will span the years 2007 through the first quarter of 2014. We will be getting quarterly updates to the data which will make this dataset the most up-to-date data we’ve ever had. This dataset will probably run 3-6 months behind real time. The Buckets Language data mining tool was specially developed to work with really huge datasets (like the Humana dataset) and to be able to deliver accurate answers to researchers in seconds, minutes, and hours that used to take days, weeks, months, and even years to answer.”
Asked if there is anything in particular that surgeon-inventors should know, Ellison commented to OTW, “PearlDiver has been piloting a program that gives research universities and research hospitals an inexpensive subscription to our Buckets Language data mining tool. This program has been a huge success for PearlDiver and all of our early participants have renewed their subscription and are eagerly looking forward to the new data. Our partnership with Humana/CHI will expand this program into the business world and we will be jointly selling subscriptions to the Buckets Language along with the Humana dataset. We believe that the customizability, the tracking capabilities, and the speed of the research software make this an ideal tool for both scholarly and commercial research.”
