Leading physicians and healthcare executives recently convened to discuss leveraging big data across the healthcare industry to improve standards of care at the first-annual STG Healthcare Advisory Council meeting. The two-day event, titled “Delivering on the Promise of Big Data in Healthcare,” brought together international industry leaders who have used big data when making decisions in the diverse disciplines they serve within healthcare. The goal of the meeting was to promote an integrated discussion to help inform a path forward to fully recognize and harness the power of big data in healthcare around the globe. Symphony Technology Group, a private equity firm and industry leader in the use of big data across healthcare, hosted the inaugural meeting in Washington, DC.

“Our team recognized that, while the utilization of big data in healthcare has been a popular topic, relatively little value has been delivered to-date because of the difficulty of working with these data,” said Simon Kennedy, Healthcare Operations Partner, Symphony Technology Group. “Our goal for the meeting was to begin to transition the conversation from the general to the specific, and to do that you need to address, in-depth, the widely varying characteristics of different types of healthcare data. We believe that there is a greater potential to harness the full potential data and analytics in our industry if that data is both ‘big’ (high volume, high velocity) and ‘deep’ (contextually and clinically rich). However, biology is not algebra so to solve the varying, and very different, applications you need also to be ‘smart’ tailoring the data and analytics used very specifically to problem at hand. This way common big data assets can be leveraged to inform and impact the different decisions made by providers, payors, government agencies and pharmaceutical companies.”

The integration of big data across the healthcare industry provides important information that can help inform future decisions by a wide variety of end users. Assembling and accessing data points, from early stage product development through the integration at the point-of-care, allows for stronger analytics and better decision making.

“It’s been an honor to be part of the inaugural Healthcare Advisory Council, which brought together a diverse group of experienced leaders to work on how to realize the potential of data in healthcare,” said Jamie Heywood, Co-Founder and Chairman of PatientsLikeMe. “It’s not enough just to connect data; for us to realize its potential we need to ensure that data serves the patient and is impactful. This will take an ongoing commitment by each part of the healthcare system. We will all need to use a holistic approach accessing, integrating, analyzing, and most importantly applying the right data in order to effectively drive improvements in patient care.”

Several key takeaways surfaced from the meeting, including the following:

• Healthcare requires a different approach to big data given the special qualities of the data themselves, the extremely high standards of quality necessary for healthcare use cases, and the critical importance of privacy and security in healthcare put simply, existing approaches to ‘big data’ championed by many tech companies do not work in healthcare
• The rapid emergence of, and dependence on, ‘real-world evidence’ is creating demand for tools and data sets that integrate and utilize the many different types of healthcare data becoming available emerging approaches to anonymize, structure, and link patient-level data have enormous promise
• The ‘consumerization’ of healthcare, with patients as increasingly informed and involved customers, is changing the fundamentals of healthcare, with profound implications across the healthcare system

“We are thrilled with the outputs of our first-annual Healthcare Advisory Council Meeting,” said Romesh Wadhwani, Founder and Chairman, Symphony Technology Group. “The insights shared and the thought leadership conveyed are a testament to what’s ahead in healthcare information technology. Our hope is that more data will lead to more accurate analyses, more informed decision-making, and improved quality of care. This group of experts is committed to using big data to collectively impact healthcare delivery and Symphony Technology Group looks forward to partnering with them on this.”

About Symphony Technology Group

Symphony Technology Group (STG) is a strategic private equity firm with the mission of investing in and building great technology and services companies. In addition to capital, STG provides transformation expertise to enable its companies to deliver maximum value to their clients, to drive growth through innovation, to retain and attract the best talent and to achieve best in class business performance. STG’s current portfolio consists of 22 global companies. For more information, please visit www.symphonytg.com.

About Symphony Performance Health

Symphony Performance Health (SPH) empowers healthcare transformation for provider, payer, and health network clients by providing them with powerful data, applications, analytics, and consulting that enables them to rapidly gain insights into their patient populations, physician, and clinician practice patterns. SPH’s solutions enhance the patient care experience, improve population health, reduce the overall cost of care, and enhance provider performance. For more information, please visit www.symphonyph.com.

About Evidera

Evidera is the world’s leading provider of market access, health economics, outcomes research, data analytics and epidemiology services. Evidera partners with life sciences organizations worldwide to optimize the market access and commercial success of their products by leveraging an unparalleled knowledge of the payer and regulatory landscape and by developing, capturing, and communicating clinical and economic evidence to substantiate product value. Evidera’s research and consulting services are driven by world-class science and thought leadership and leverage a complementary offering of cutting edge tools and methodologies. For more information, please visit www.evidera.com.

About Symphony Health Solutions

Symphony Health Solutions (SHS) provides high-value data, analytics, applications and consulting to identify actionable insights for healthcare and life sciences companies. Significant changes are radically reshaping the healthcare ecosystem and SHS’s services provide a comprehensive, leading-edge perspective on the real dynamics of physician, prescriber, and payer interactions that can make or break the commercial success of pharmaceutical brands. For more information, please visit www.symphonyhealth.com.

About System C

System C specializes in providing the health and social care sectors in the United Kingdom with robust, modern IT solutions that are easy to use and help care professionals deliver real improvements in efficiency and quality of care. Its Medway suite of clinical and care management systems is being used across 40 hospitals in the U.K.’s National Health Service and by the private sector. Through its subsidiary company Liquidlogic, System C provides multi-agency health and social care solutions to enable collaboration working across the care services. For more information, please visit www.systemc.com.