Real-World Data Can Bring Value to Life Sciences Companies Operating in a Value-Based World

January 8, 2023

The healthcare industry — from providers and health systems to payers — is increasingly adopting value-based care practices, which is not surprising given that approximately 61% of all healthcare payments are tied to value and quality in some way. In fact, initiatives from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and commercial payers provide financial incentives to organizations that can demonstrate the effective delivery of patient-centered, evidence-based care while managing costs. For life sciences companies working in complex diseases such as cancer, determining how to succeed in value-based arrangements can feel like the “next frontier.” 

Real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) are not new concepts to the life sciences industry. These organizations have tapped real-world longitudinal data to understand treatment efficacy, outcomes, and disease progression for research, market access, and commercial decisions. Additionally, the FDA has tasked these organizations to harness RWE as part of their post-market surveillance efforts and demonstrate that a drug is effective outside of clinical trials. 

However, the increased drive toward value-based care, especially in specialty care areas like oncology, means that life sciences organizations need to tap into RWD in a new way: understanding a treatment’s total potential and impact in practice.  While RWD isn’t new, it can feel like new data vendors enter the market every day, making it hard to know where to turn for high-quality RWD. For effective decisions, organizations need to ensure they tap high-quality data assets. This means, organizations need to focus on the size of the dataset and the quality of the information, ensuring it’s derived from a wide array of sources, with relevant and complete information that can be compiled into complete, longitudinal patient journeys. 

Below are a few guiding principles, using oncology as an example: 

Leverage Claims and Clinical Data

Claims data is a popular source for organizations participating in value-based care arrangements. For life sciences organizations, claims data can help ascertain the uptake of the drug, but clinical data from a wide array of sources is necessary to understand a treatment’s impact on patient outcomes.

Turn Data into Knowledge

To get the most effective insights possible, organizations need longitudinal data from a wide variety of sources. Data must include patient health information from multiple EMR systems, as well as sociodemographic, genomic, lab, prescription, imaging, patient-reported, and death information. However, in order to harness this data for actionable insights, it must be aggregated and viewable in detail. This is why organizations are increasingly adopting advanced IT platforms capable of organizing this data and artificial intelligence that’s able to surface much-needed insights.

Partner with Experts

Organizations that partner with a leading expert in RWD can optimize the entire R&D process from start to finish. Beyond the above requirements, for success in specialty areas like oncology, the ideal RWD/RWE partner should be a domain expert with strong links to community practices, who has an in-depth understanding of how to customize a platform to the drug’s lifecycle and the technological capabilities to identify unmet needs and opportunities.

For example, Integra Connect is a value-based, precision medicine company that leads the industry in RWD and analytics capabilities for oncology. With clinical and claims data reflecting more than 11 million lives, decades of value-based care expertise, and sophisticated technologies, it enables specialty care providers, health systems, payers, and life sciences companies to improve patient outcomes, provider decision-making, business operations and performance, and clinical research for success under value-based care models. 

Since it was founded, Integra Connect has supported more than 5,000 providers, six payer organizations, and many life sciences companies in advancing value-based, precision medicine. Notably, Integra Connect enabled more than 1,500 oncology providers and payer organizations to succeed under the Oncology Care Model, generating more than $240M in value-based care revenue and $50M in shared savings for customers to date, launched custom alternative payments for oncology for leading insurers, and leveraged real-world data sets to support life sciences research into precision medicine advancements, which were later presented at American Society of Clinical Oncology, American Society of Hematology, European Society for Medical Oncology, and the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium.