The Evidence Community model represents a sea change in how medical manufacturers and other healthcare organizations collaborate and use resources.
Santa Monica, California (PRWEB) November 06, 2013
Since Doctor Evidence, LLC (DRE) released its Evidence On Demand (EOD) system of indexing, categorizing and requesting of clinical data from published clinical studies, its clients have reaped rewards in the form of greater evidence availability, improved turnaround, and targeted deliverables of client goals. Now, EOD has found an additional application as the lynchpin to DRE’s enterprise-wide client model for the building of an “Evidence Community” (EC). The EC model is based around building a digital clinical database in a company’s main therapeutic area that unifies different users, work groups, departments, and business unit functions by aggregating collaboration for clinical evidence across the enterprise.
The Evidence Community methodology leverages Doctor Evidence’s Digital Outcome Conversion (DOC™) platform, which works to improve clients’ internal and external communication of evidence findings through the use of an integrated suite of programs including DOC Library (reference storage), DOC Data (evidence analysis and summary), and DOC Create (networked development of evidence-backed deliverables). The centralized, integrated aspect of DOC solutions is key to DRE's greater goal of unifying departments and stakeholders through the open communication of evidence.
Increased evidence demands require rapid yet thorough responses to the numerous inquiries associated with the market entry and ongoing support of a new treatment. The related organizational dilemma is controlling quality of evidence projects and the ballooning expense internally as well as with external vendors. Too often the work related to these responses is performed piecemeal, with individuals from different work groups, work streams and departments operating independently to achieve the same or similar results. Redundancy of effort and general inefficiency results from the incomplete and disparate information that, for lack of a centralized communication conduit, becomes siloed within different parts of the larger institution. DRE provides a centralized communication conduit and other benefits including streamlined collaboration and faster recognition of commercial opportunities through ready access to current evidence.
By building an Evidence Community around a single, comprehensive resource, procurement departments will quickly be able to recognize and quantify redundancies in work efforts across previously isolated groups, leading to enterprise-wide improvements in efficiency. Within the organization, the EC model aims to improve overall efficiency by eliminating redundancies of resource use and expenditures. This approach encourages good corporate citizenship and responsibility across multiple departments to facilitate work-stream collaboration in a way not otherwise attainable. Individual departments can function as the seed for growth of a project topic across multiple departments in any therapeutic area. As a project grows in scope, or other departments need to access or expand scope, they can get the benefit of prior work and get incrementally charged for just their expansion needs.
“The Evidence Community model represents a sea change in how medical manufacturers and other healthcare organizations collaborate and use resources,” said Robert Battista, CEO and co-founder of Doctor Evidence, LLC. “The typical top tier manufacturer is in a half dozen therapeutic areas and has over 200 service vendors in their ecosystem servicing any one of those TAs with radically varying degrees of thoroughness. The EC model is focused on building collaborative evidence communities within a manufacturer in a natural, organic and evolving manner. Early phase departments, which are often times marginally funded, can economically initiate an evidence repository that will live and grow stronger throughout the phases of development and commercialization. This approach touches all points of the triangle: 1) increased quality, 2) increased speed, and 3) decreased costs. All this while drastically increasing the effectiveness of other consultancy vendors. Over the course of a therapy’s life, the EC program can ultimately optimize the value of any particular molecule’s market appeal and can save companies ten-fold thanks to major improvements in efficiency and collaboration.”
DOC Data’s Evidence On Demand process is a key aspect of the EC initiative. In the EC model, users from different departments and client partners such as external consultants would have access to a single EOD interface for viewing the evidence landscape created by the published studies captured within DOC Data. Power users from teams throughout the organization could then use the common EOD interface to view and request evidence according to their specific priorities. HEOR departments could easily find commonly reported outcomes to perform meta-analyses for publication while regulatory and risk groups could find outlier data in the study set. Similarly, Medical Affairs and Medical Communications can find exacting data in the evidence community projects for solicited or unsolicited payer responses, regulatory responses or other information requests. Requests from different departments within an organization would be tracked and billed according to individual departments, but the resultant requested data would be available organization-wide, allowing clients to pool internal resources and receive cumulative returns while aligning company goals through better communication of priorities between groups.
Clients also have the option to expand access to the EOD system to other stakeholders in the healthcare system, including policy makers, payers, providers and guideline developers. In return, manufacturers will be able to be notified which specific requested outcomes and characteristics payers are evaluating in the body of data. This information can be extremely valuable for directing the focus of future trials, determining corporate return on investment, and stakeholder attributes analysis.
More information on Evidence On Demand, DOC Data and other DOC products can be found on the Doctor Evidence website, http://www.doctorevidence.com.
About Evidence On Demand
The challenge and difficulty of most EBM reviews and comparative effectiveness research is the considerable overhead associated with high accuracy and quality work outputs. Due to the traditional difficulty in performing high-quality reviews, the work often gets compromised with proxies and shortcuts to reduce time and costs. Many organizations extract data into Excel or other transient and flat environments that lack the structure, robustness and discipline of an enterprise-class software platform that helps with controlled ontologies and taxonomies.
EOD eliminates the dilemma of the tradeoffs that evidence teams often make regarding what endpoints they choose or do not choose to collect. The EOD system allows for a focus on high-value characteristics and outcomes (for example, a seldom-reported adverse event) that were not initially identified as critical but that, in the context of the entire dataset, may emerge from the literature with greater importance than originally expected.
The EOD process begins with the creation of a categorized index of every data variable from each study within a given clinical project, along with the number of studies in which each variable occurs. This is presented to clients in the form of a comprehensive frequency tree from which, using the EOD interface within DOC Data, clients select and request their specific data variable(s) of interest for data extraction by internal Doctor Evidence teams. The EOD methodology employs a hybrid of human capital and software technologies, applying resources early in the project process to comprehensively index data from each article selected for extraction. The indexed data is in turn displayed in an intuitive graphical user interface for end-users to request specific data variables, maintaining full transparency of the underlying data and therefore eliminating the need for an intermediary to make data-selection criterion decisions.
About Doctor Evidence, LLC
Doctor Evidence is a specialty software platform and services company aimed to assist stakeholders across the healthcare ecosystem to make and inform clinical and business decisions with the most relevant medical evidence. The Doctor Evidence methodology uses a Digital Outcome Conversion (DOC™) approach of taking data from published clinical studies, FDA drug labels, and epidemiological databases to transform static data into reusable, dynamic relational databases. Our software platform empowers both public and private sector clients to identify the most relevant literature and conduct ready analyses with the highest level of transparency available for today's evidence-based medicine methodological standards, in the pursuit of reducing healthcare costs while increasing the quality of patient outcomes. The DOC™ Evidence platform currently holds over six million data points that have abstracted from clinical literature, with counts increasing every day as new projects are completed.
Doctor Evidence serves decision-makers in two large addressable market segments, Medical Manufacturers and Healthcare Providers, for the ultimate wellbeing of patients. Doctor Evidence is helping to transform the healthcare ecosystem by identifying the most efficacious and safe medical treatment on a comparative-effectiveness basis, including related economic costs and total-cost-of-care analysis.