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“As much as 80% of our health and well-being is affected by social determinants, such as whether someone can access or afford medical care, their level of healthcare literacy, their access to transportation, and their food and housing vulnerabilities,” Tim Suther, senior vice president of data solutions at Change Healthcare, said in the announcement.
“By integrating data beyond the clinical setting, we can understand how diverse life circumstances affect treatment efficacy. That understanding is key in improving outcomes and healthcare economics,” Suther continued.
Overall, the partnership will improve precision medicine and personalized care.
All insights algorithms developed in DSaaS are monitored and compliant results may be exported for operation behind client firewalls or within Change Healthcare networks.
DSaaS offers an operating model to develop insight into therapeutic effectiveness while avoiding inequities due to social determinants, Change Healthcare explained. Each DSaaS is dedicated to a single client, which allows for the flexibility to add unique datasets, analytic tools, and methods for a client’s exclusive use.
Currently, The Duke University School of Medicine uses DSaaS to explore differences in COVID-19 disease progression as a function of pre-existing conditions and interventions for different ethnic and socio-economic subgroups.
Michael Pencina, vice dean for data science and information technology at Duke University School of Medicine, explained that the university’s work highlights how comparative effectiveness research needs to incorporate ethnicity and social determinants of health.
With the current lack of clinical trial diversity, there is no way to truly assess the impact of these therapies and interventions.
A JAMA Network Open study recently found that overall, among US-based vaccine clinical trials, members of racial or ethnic minority groups and older adults were underrepresented.
Meanwhile, white individuals were overrepresented (77.9 percent of the time) in clinical trials.
In the same trials, Black or African American individuals were represented just 10.6 percent of the time and Hispanic or Latino participants were represented 11.6 percent of the time. And Asian individuals and American Indian or Alaska Native individuals were represented the least amount in the trials, at just 5.7 percent and 0.4 percent, respectively.
Among trials reporting race or ethnicity, 65 (48.5 percent) did not include American Indian or Alaska Native participants and 81 (60.4 percent) did not include Hawaiian or Pacific Islander participants.
According to researchers, these findings suggest that diversity enrollment targets should be included for all vaccine trials targeting epidemiologically important infections.
“Providing secure access to comprehensive, linked healthcare datasets will enable life sciences organizations to personalize the patient experiences, support, and enable powerful population-level comparative research to improve precision medicine and personalized care, such as medication adherence, around the world,” Wilson To, head of worldwide healthcare business development at AWS, said in the partnership announcement.
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