Brigham and Women’s Hospital (Boston, MA, USA) have joined with GNS Healthcare (Cambridge, MA, USA) to use computer-simulation models to predict the likelihood of adverse drug events and hospital readmission in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF).

Under the partnership, GNS Healthcare will collect data from the electronic health records (EHRs) of thousands of CHF patients admitted into the Brigham and Women’s Partners HealthCare system track the relationships between such variables as diagnoses and combinations of drugs patients are taking, and then determine how they might cause an adverse reaction. The generated models can also take into consideration the order in which certain diagnoses occurred or drugs were taken. The simulation models created can then be used to examine specific patients and determine how they match up against certain variables tracked in the system, thus better understanding the likelihood of a negative drug reaction or hospital readmission.

“Something like this is not a research project; it gets deployed to be able to support decision making,” said Tom Neyarapally, senior vice president of corporate development for GNS Healthcare. “Doctors can then avoid administering the drugs likely to cause harm and find alternate treatments, or pay closer attention to patients in which the adverse events cannot be prevented - rather than treating a patient after the fact and backtracking to determine the cause of reactions. Experts can hone in on a small number of trillions of possibilities.”

Revenue models for the technology include sharing in the savings that result from deploying it, licensing the technology to groups who want to use them, or working with management firms who handle healthcare on a per member, per month basis; the exact financial model of the partnership with Brigham and Women’s, however, was not revealed. Adverse events that could have been prevented are estimated to cost the US healthcare system US$50 billion per year.

Guangzhou Jia Yu medical equipment Limited