Data Collaboration Aims to Improve Long-Term Patient Care, Health Disparities

Boston Scientific and provider-created data collective Truveta have announced a strategic collaboration aimed at improving long-term patient care and gaining insights into health disparities through data and analytics.

Fourteen health systems partnered to form Truveta last year to leverage big data analytics for enhanced care insights. Since then, Truveta has significantly increased its membership, with members totaling 24 healthcare organizations as of this month, when four new health systems joined the collective.

Truveta’s membership provides care through over 700 hospitals and 20,000 clinics across 43 US states. Data are gathered from these sites of care, de-identified, and provided to Truveta, which then pools and analyzes the data daily, according to the prior announcement. These data are then made available for medical research and to inform care strategies.

Through the new collaboration, Boston Scientific will gain access to these data, which the press release states contain de-identified EMR information from over 65 million US patients, to study multiple diseases and outcomes, starting with peripheral artery disease.

“Truveta will enable us to gather insights on a breadth of devices and disease states, including peripheral artery disease, venous thromboembolic disease, and segments of interventional oncology,” said Michael R. Jaff, DO, vascular medicine specialist and chief medical officer and vice president, Medical Affairs, Innovation and Technology, Peripheral Interventions at Boston Scientific, in the press release. “The first analysis will focus on gaining a deeper understanding of the long-term patient outcomes relating to the use of our products indicated for treatment of peripheral artery disease and will enable us to further our commitment to addressing the disparities in access to healthcare that exist across various patient populations and demographics.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), peripheral artery disease (PAD) is a condition characterized by the narrowing or blockage of the vessels that transport blood from the heart to the legs. PAD is primarily caused by atherosclerosis, or the buildup of fatty plaque in the arteries, and impacts roughly 6.5 million people in the US over 40. Black patients are at an increased risk of PAD, and Hispanic individuals may have similar or slightly higher rates of PAD than their White counterparts.

A blog post accompanying the press release states that Truveta’s data are augmented with social determinants of health (SDOH), mortality, and claims data, providing a broad picture of US health across race, ethnicity, geography, and other factors. The data collective also shared its own PAD insights in a research blog post this week, including information on major adverse outcomes, such as lower limb amputation, and racial disparities in PAD treatment.

This is Truveta’s latest partnership focused on combatting health disparities.

In January, the collective announced a collaboration with LexisNexis Risk Solutions to improve research quality and enable insights related to health equity as part of the collective’s goal to address health disparities and SDOH.