Healthcare AI: Accelerating Innovation to Advance Precision Medicine

For decades, healthcare and policy leaders have developed plans to reduce federal healthcare spending, which reached $4.3 trillion in 2021. Given recent economic shifts globally and domestically, finding solutions to mitigate healthcare costs has become even more important. Few sustainable solutions exist, and additional, more complex healthcare issues continue to emerge.

Growing evidence suggests implementing precision medicine in clinical practice will improve population health outcomes and lower healthcare costs. Precision medicine tailors the prevention, diagnosis, and/or treatment of disease based on an individual’s characteristics or demographics. This ability to customize care is often powered by artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, including machine learning.

In 2021, U.S. investment in healthcare AI exceeded $6 billion with an annualized growth of nearly 50% projected between 2017-2023. Despite these investments, major challenges remain when designing successful programs to efficiently leverage AI capabilities.

Technological innovation must seamlessly unite clinical practice with healthcare infrastructure to provide clinical and economic value. To provide actionable information, teams must develop flexible frameworks that integrate large, comprehensive datasets, leverage effective and efficient analytical tools, and incorporate insights from expert partners across distinct healthcare sectors.

Decode Health is helping our partners overcome these challenges. Honed over the course of a decade, Decode applies its data know-how to assemble clinical and biological data as well as social determinants of health (SDoH) information. The Decode team then applies machine learning approaches through a robust analytics pipeline. We provide a fast, accurate, adaptable, and scalable AI platform to tackle complex healthcare challenges. Application of these pipelines can lead to the discovery of biomarkers that can increase the success rates of clinical trials, fuel the development of new diagnostics, and identify novel drug targets. These efforts lead to improved patient outcomes, reduced healthcare costs, and enhanced health equity.

There are two prominent challenges that must be addressed when developing an AI platform to analyze growing amounts of complex healthcare and biological data. First, the data must be assimilated into a cohesive data source that incorporates and maintains the fidelity and security of the underlying clinical, biological, and SDoH data. Next, systems must be in place to analyze these large, interconnected datasets to provide patient-specific information. These challenges are intensified by the diverse, non-standardized data that exists throughout the healthcare ecosystem. For instance, tools to analyze insurance claims are very different than methods to decipher complex molecular datasets that are growing in prevalence due to the high degree of specificity these data sources can offer to understand and predict patient outcomes.

Decode’s platform is built to address these issues, using a flexible engine to incorporate, manipulate and transform diverse datasets. Furthermore, our proprietary pipelines combine the power of machine learning algorithms to discover the discrete yet distinct patterns in healthcare datasets to gain insights that are otherwise hidden. These insights can extend from the identification of molecular biomarkers to track disease progression to the monitoring of clinical data sources to understand treatment responses as a function of the social, physical and environmental factors where patients live.

Our work with Quest Diagnostics is an example of the power of collaboration and Decode’s AI platform. Our initial work utilizes RNA sequencing datasets and in-depth clinical annotations to identify novel biomarkers for diagnostic development in multiple sclerosis. Multiple sclerosis affects nearly 3 million people and costs the U.S. healthcare system more than $90 billion annually. Discovery of biomarkers that can identify patients early and monitor their response to treatment enables early intervention and optimal disease management. Our findings show enhanced autoimmune patient care can save over 20% of healthcare costs annually and dramatically improve quality of life.

Collaboration provides the necessary components for groundbreaking discoveries where advanced data analysis is pursued from different perspectives. As part of our Quest relationship, we developed methods to coordinate clinical relationships and obtain the necessary biosamples and clinical data to fuel our discovery efforts. Nurturing a diverse, collaborative ecosystem is our goal as we endeavor to create new solutions that will shape the future of healthcare. While healthcare is notoriously siloed, Decode partners with pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic companies, and other innovative healthcare technology companies to leverage our proprietary and award-winning methods of:

• Defining datasets, risk, and opportunity;
• Developing and optimizing AI modeling approaches;
• Revealing actionable, predictive insights; and
• Repeating the cycle.

The Decode ecosystem has further expanded with the recently announced Becton Dickinson (BD) partnership. Together, we are developing and validating at-home blood sample collection devices for molecular testing. Complementing Decode’s work with diagnostic and pharmaceutical companies, the implications of at-home testing to rapidly inform patient care and broaden access and representation in clinical trials and research are limitless. Fast, easy methods to routinely capture increasing amounts of data, including lab testing data, can enhance clinical decisions and track patient outcomes.

With increasing data amounts and complexity, many predict AI will deliver the innovative breakthroughs that are needed to change healthcare for the better. The Decode platform simplifies these complexities and facilitates the radical collaboration that is required to deliver on the promise of precision medicine. Our work is helping large companies throughout the healthcare sector successfully advance their initiatives and more quickly realize an ROI on their AI investment. Contact us to discuss how partnering with Decode can help your organization accelerate innovation.