SAS, Optum Building Cloud-Based Health Analytics Platform for Life Sciences

CARY, NC (April 20, 2015) The shift from volume- to performance-based payment is propelling life sciences companies to seek concrete data and medical evidence – both to understand patient care and to demonstrate the effectiveness, safety and value of drug therapies. To help life sciences clients better manage, analyze and share data, business analytics leader SAS is launching a cloud-based, real-world data analytics platform.

The new service features de-identified integrated claims and clinical data about everyday patients receiving health care, including prescriptions and labs – data from the real world, not just trials.

Today, pharmaceutical and life sciences companies struggle with the tedious data processing required to dig out insights. For the new platform, Optum, a leading information and technology-enabled health services business, is the first collaborator to join SAS in offering an integrated solution that includes clinical and claims data with a user-friendly interface and a unified, scalable analytics toolset. Optum will contribute health care expertise, analytics and vast stores of clinical data to the SAS^® data warehousing platform, which will provide the on-demand, advanced analytics necessary to provide valuable insights for life sciences clients. While Optum will be the first data and analytics collaborator, the open data platform will soon incorporate data from multiple providers.

“With pay-for-performance reimbursement models rewarding quality over quantity, life sciences companies must provide data-driven insights to help health care system participants – pharmaceutical companies, doctors, health plans and others – make better decisions across the clinical and commercial continuum,” said Brian Kelly, President of Life Sciences at Optum. “Working together, Optum and SAS can innovate with scale and create an unmatched, data-agnostic resource to guide these decisions.”

Optum’s de-identified claims data and comprehensive clinical electronic health records are among the marketplace’s largest asset sets, while its research methods and clinical experience are among the deepest. Combining these assets with industry-leading SAS software in a cloud-based analytics platform will provide a deep store of health care data for clinical, economic and market research. Optum is the first organization to offer its data assets through the new platform. Future plans include an open development environment where new databases and automated analytics “apps” can be added as needed.

“SAS and Optum bring together resources and expertise to create an integrated platform that supports health economics and outcomes research,” said Graham Hughes, MD, Chief Medical Officer at SAS. “The ability to analyze data at this scale will provide invaluable insights to guide the development of new therapies, as well as more effective use of existing treatments.”