Briefs

By Mark D. Uehling, Bio-IT World

(05/03/05) You're an insurance company. You've got data on the prescriptions, general health, and laboratory tests of 11 million Americans. You've already used that data to reduce your own costs related to prescription drugs. What to do? Why, sell your data to pharma, naturally.

That's the strategy of a subsidiary of UnitedHealth Group called i3 Research, which later this year hopes to sell its de-identified, HIPAA-compliant data to the FDA and the industry.

The i3 objective: monitor drug safety issues in ordinary patients after a drug's approval, far from the tightly controlled realm of clinical trials in which most patients take just a single medication. Thus i3's database will monitor real-world patients, and thereby supplement the black art of determining which medications are working as expected � and which are triggering broad patterns of side effects across the population.

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Because i3's database includes concomitant medications and other clinical information, it's already clear that meaty, national epidemiological questions could be explored. In its data-mining techniques, Tramuto says, i3 is combining its own proprietary algorithms and software from third-party vendors; the company intends to provide the sharpest possible tools to customers. ...

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