COVID-19: Why Healthcare needs to adopt Real World Evidence

Koustav Chatterjee, Industry Principal for Frost and Sullivan’s Transformation Health Practice, elucidates on how Real World Evidence (RWE) helps to explore, analyze, visualize and share real world outcomes on healthcare data to formulate a strong built-for-health cloud environment to support the COVID crisis management.

While the entire healthcare industry is caught in the quagmire of dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, there is an increasing trend, transcending towards innovation in order to deliver a fast, effective and cost saving-treatment stratagem. Although healthcare sector often paces at a much slower rate compared to the other industries— with the COVID-19 outbreak hitting hard, it has adapted itself to embrace digitalization and move towards a proactive model rather than treatment-focussed reactive model.

Timothy Hoctor, Elsevier’s Vise- President of life sciences states that Real World Evidence is the information captured and recorded as a “by-product of everyday patient care.” As COVID-19 outbreak continues to spread across the country, real world evidence is positioned to emerge as the most predominant technology to help combat the deadly virus. In a poll conducted by GlobalData’s Pharmaceutical Technology, it was found that one-third of the respondents indicated real world evidence has a much higher impact in managing the COVID crisis.

Real world Evidence: The Upcoming New Wave

Koustav Chatterjee, Industry Principal Digital Health of Frost and Sullivan

Mr. Chatterjee is very optimistic and believes that real-world evidence holds the clue for improved outcomes in our fight against COVID-19. But he suggests that “the healthcare enterprises must not confuse between the role of tools that generate disparate real-world data (RWD) at a population level and the contribution of integrated digital health platforms that convert insights—drawn from RWD—into actionable evidence (RWE) in real-life setting for various stakeholders.” This actionable evidence solutions help to pursue the data-driven decisions across the care continuum.

Frost & Sullivan research finds out that real world evidence (RWE) solutions allow healthcare end-users to identify gaps in care early and to intervene with evidence that visualizes how to personalize treatment, automate clinical trials and predict outcomes for COVID-19 patients.

Embracing Real World Data

Globally, healthcare companies that include payers, providers, pharmaceuticals, health information technology, information and communication technology and regulatory agencies are embracing targeted strategies to leverage real world evidence against COVID-19. Frost & Sullivan research finds out that everyone plays a unique role in the overall real world evidence ecosystem which can be powered by three core services– data management, business intelligence and quality reporting.

In terms of applications,  several major activities are happening around the world. For instance, Komodo Health captures data of more than 15 million new patient encounters a day and continuously add to their data sources to ensure that their foundation is strong, complete and connected. These de-identified patient database is  then further used to understand and provide not only in-depth insights but also improvement opportunities.

Learning from Real Problem: Standing still is not an option

Application of real world evidence in front-line COVID-19 treatment pathways is a revolutionary step, primarily because there are just too many unknown variables in the process of clinical intervention for COVID-19 patients. “Without a past pattern of treatment outcomes and a proven track record of reliable clinical therapy, application of real world evidence for COVID-19 treatments has to be supported by precise, peer-reviewed and real-time patient data which is accessible in an technologically injectable format via either electronic medical records, clinical decision support systemor healthcare command centers. That is why it becomes hard to practice real world data-led COVID-19 treatments at scale," says Mr. Chatterjee.

However, with the help of the large information and communication tech. companies, the global healthcare industry may soon expect dedicated IT infrastructure that leverages real world data on cloud and present real world evidence at point of care near real time for COVID-19 patients at a region level.

Breaking Down Barriers

Although it is a very nascent stage to determine whether real world evidence can completely overcome the barriers to clinical trials for breakthrough COVID therapies but if paid proper attention to other high risk high burden disease areas such as oncology, it is seen that RWE has already demonstrated significant utility to match patients to ideal clinical trials in a hospital setting, at scale. For instance, Flatiron believes that learning from real world clinical data of every cancer patient is the key to accelerate research with and improve the quality of care.

Pharma companies on the other hand, are aggressively working with real world evidence IT vendors to visualize early results of experimental COVID-19 trials to the extent where they are able to expedite drug discovery and research and reduce average time to find COVID-19 related vaccines and bio markers.

Even large scale IT companies like Microsoft are investing on philanthropic clinical research on COVID-19 to correlate vulnerability of different chronic patient populations to COVID-19 based on their underlying clinical immunity.

From Crisis to Intelligence

Real World Evidence is reassuring that we can win our war against COVID-19 with precise clinical intelligence and data-driven intervention at scale. Although, globally not all countries exhibit the same maturity level in terms regulatory impetus, corporate-buy-in and overall market investment, required to build, manage and maintain a robust RWE ecosystem. Many countries are not even ready to capture RWD uniformly across the care continuum. However, it is true that RWE is the next new wave for the  healthcare industry for competitive advantage and sustainable growth.

Smooth Success of Real World Evidence

With COVID-19 hitting hard, digitalization is the new reality but the question that remains unanswered is how to ensure smooth success of this digitalization. Mr. Koustav believes that the first step to mitigate this issue is the comprehensive digitization of the healthcare sector. “RWE is not only built for covid but for all high risk high burden disease areas that are of national importance. Mature markets acknowledge that requirement at all levels of healthcare,” he stresses.

Although he accepts that interoperability is still a massive issue globally, however giving the example of  NASA Supercomputers, he opines that with open application programming interface or research movements, disparate healthcare systems can be integrated at a national level for robust data aggregation. In this regard, regulatory agencies must pave the way for collaborative healthcare strategies by bringing in policies that prevent data blocking and mandate creation of registries for COVID-19 from electronic medical records, tele-health solutions and contact tracing apps.

It is true that COVID-19 is rewriting the future of healthcare and IT-enabled healthcare is no longer an add-on or good-to-have, but a strategic imperative for competitive advantage and sustainable growth.