Aetna and Harvard Medical School Announce Research Collaboration

Aetna and the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School have announced a research agreement aimed at analyzing health care data in new ways to further clinical research and improve the quality and affordability of health care. The research will be conducted by members of the Center for Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School and Aetna clinicians and informatics specialists. It will be supervised by Isaac (Zak) Kohane, M.D., Ph.D., Henderson Professor of Pediatrics and Health Sciences and Technology at Harvard Medical School (HMS) and co-director of the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics, and Brian Kelly, M.D., head of Informatics and Strategic Alignment at Aetna.

“If our health care system is going to become a ‘learning’ health care system, we need to better use the enormous amount of information we derive from health care to develop tools to understand what is happening today —such as which drugs are not working as safely as we thought, which therapies have unexpected benefits, what are the predictors of effective diabetes management and which genetic tests are likely to usefully guide therapy,” said Dr. Kohane. “Major advances in research and clinical care can be made by applying new bioinformatics techniques to large, aggregated clinical databases. We are excited about the opportunity to work with Aetna to rapidly develop and deploy algorithms and applications that can make a real impact on biomedical discovery and patient care,” he said.

“We are delighted to be working with a thought leader in health care and bioinformatics like Harvard Medical School on this initiative. Aetna has been committed to using health care information technology to improve the quality and affordability of health care, and through this collaboration we believe we can together make an even greater impact,” said Dr. Brian Kelly.
Bioinformatics is the application of computer science and information technology to the field of biology and medicine. Researchers on the project will benefit from the extensive clinical resources and expertise available through the HMS Center for Biomedical Informatics and its affiliated institutions as they focus on:

•    Evaluating the outcomes of various treatments for specific conditions based on quality and cost;
•    Determining factors that predict adherence to medical and drug treatments for chronic diseases;
•    Studying how claims data and clinical data available through electronic health records can best be used to predict disease and follow outcomes; and
•    Improving the ability to predict adverse events through the proactive study of claims and clinical data.