ACC, Symphony Health Solutions Create New Cardiac Research Platform

February 12, 2015 – Symphony Health Solutions (SHS) and the American College of Cardiology announced the completion of a new research platform. The HIPAA-compliant platform combines anonymized patient-level data from the ACC's National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) with SHS's Integrated Dataverse, which includes prescription, medical and hospital claims. The newly integrated data includes approximately 5 million anonymized patients with up to six years of observed diagnoses, procedures, therapies and related findings.

Information from a large set of patients that is both broad in scope and deep in detail has, before now, been difficult to obtain — yet vital to improve care. The creation of a new analytical platform now enables a wide range of new analyses to help achieve that goal. The organizations will use the combined data sources to complete research projects focused on clinical outcomes, comparative effectiveness, therapy adoption and use, and population health, as well as additional studies and projects of interest. These analyses of patterns and treatments can ultimately improve care, enhance outcomes and reduce unnecessary healthcare costs.

"This analytic platform is ground-breaking in the level of data it will provide," said John S. Rumsfeld, M.D., Ph.D., FACC, chief science officer of the American College of Cardiology National Cardiovascular Data Registries. "The partnership between ACC and SHS brings together the detailed clinical data from the registries with the longitudinal data resources of SHS. This creates a synergy that can yield critical insights on improving cardiovascular care and patient outcomes."

Analytics solutions produced through the collaboration will have broad applicability across the healthcare market. Entities such as life sciences organizations and the government, with whom ACC and SHS engage today, will also benefit from the new research offerings.

For more information: www.symphonyhealth.com or www.acc.org