Change Healthcare in Collaboration with AWS Announces a New Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) Offering to Drive Improved Outcomes and Healthcare Economics for Vulnerable Health Communities

DSaaS offering enables more comprehensive analysis of health outcomes using healthcare and social determinants data in a security-enabled analytic cloud service with persistent compliance monitoring

Change Healthcare announced a new collaboration with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) to better assess and improve the effectiveness of interventions and therapies, particularly for underserved and vulnerable populations.

The new Data Science as a Service (DSaaS) offering provides de-identified claims data, enhanced with social determinants of health, enabling security and tailored for individual customers seeking to develop and deploy compliant health analytics at scale. Historically, the process of using regulated health data with social determinants is manual, slow, and fraught with compliance challenges. Leveraging the agility, scale, and security of AWS, DSaaS will address those problems by pre-integrating data and deploying automated software that consistently monitors adherence to privacy/compliance obligations to make patient-level integration of de-identified claims, SDOH, behavioral health, and other novel data practical and timely.

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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,” said Tim Suther, senior vice president of Data Solutions at Change Healthcare. “Traditional comparative research fails to effectively account for these inequities. By integrating data beyond the clinical setting—in a way that supports privacy—we can understand how diverse life circumstances affect treatment efficacy. That understanding is key in improving outcomes and healthcare economics.”

The Duke University School of Medicine uses DSaaS to explore differences in COVID-19 disease progression as a function of pre-existing conditions and various interventions for different ethnic and socio-economic subgroups. “Our work on COVID-19 highlights how comparative effectiveness research needs to better incorporate ethnicity and social determinants of health to truly assess the real impact of therapies and interventions,” says Michael Pencina, vice dean for Data Science and Information Technology at Duke University School of Medicine.

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DSaaS offers a compelling operating model to develop unique insight into therapeutic effectiveness while avoiding inequities due to social determinants. Each DSaaS instance is dedicated to a single client, enabling the flexibility to add unique datasets, analytic tools, and methods for a client’s exclusive use. All clients can access Change Healthcare’s de-identified patient-level dataset, spanning diagnoses, care prescriptions, and social determinants across the U.S. healthcare system. All insights, scores, or algorithms developed in DSaaS are monitored for compliance. Compliant results may be exported for operation behind client firewalls or, optionally, within Change Healthcare networks.

“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,” said Wilson To, head of Worldwide Healthcare Business Development at AWS. “DSaaS expands the long-standing collaboration between Change Healthcare and AWS, and provides life sciences organizations innovative tools to accelerate research and improve commercial operations.”

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